Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 11

Posted on July 22, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 31, 2016

Portrait-cW So far we’ve taken Shirley up to the middle of 1937. She’s been Hollywood’s top box-office star for two years, and she’ll go on to be for two years more. This is probably a good time to deal with one of Hollywood’s most persistent and tantalizing legends: Is it true that Shirley Temple was originally set to play Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz? The short answer is: No, but there may be a complicated grain of truth to the legend. In fact, given Shirley’s stature in the industry during the mid-to-late 1930s, it’s unlikely that there wouldn’t be something to it.

First of all, before we go any further, dismiss from your mind any images of Shirley chirping her way through “Over the Rainbow” or pumping her fists and pouting that she wants to go home. Frankly, I suspect those are scare-images conjured up by Judy Garland’s more jealous fans, in that unique way they have of seeking to tear down anyone they see as a threat (Deanna Durbin, for example) — as if Judy needs that kind of help. If Shirley had made The Wizard of Oz, there would certainly have been no “Over the Rainbow”, and possibly no songs by Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg at all. The Wizard of Oz starring Shirley Temple would have been utterly and absolutely different — far more different, for example, than Gone With the Wind would have been if Paulette Goddard had played Scarlett rather than Vivien Leigh. Granted, it’s hard to imagine The Wizard of Oz being any better (though it’s not impossible: I do wish Buddy Ebsen had been able to stay on as the Tin Man). But that doesn’t mean it would have been any worse. Just different. In that alternate universe where Shirley played Dorothy, W.C. Fields played the Wizard, Buddy Ebsen played the Scarecrow and Edna May Oliver was the Wicked Witch of the West, it’s entirely possible that people there cherish their Wizard of Oz just as much as we do ours.

The most common form of the legend goes like this: In 1937, 20th Century Fox and MGM worked out a tentative star-swap. Fox would get the services of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow to star in a picture called Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow about the Chicago Fire of 1871; in return, MGM would get Shirley to play Dorothy in Oz and to co-star in another picture with Gable. But when Harlow died suddenly in June 1937 the whole deal was off; Fox made their picture, now called In Old Chicago, with Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, and MGM didn’t get Shirley.

The story is interesting, with an appealing for-the-want-of-a-nail quality to it. Henry King, the man who eventually directed In Old Chicago, told it once in print (I recall reading it, but have been unable to remember or track down where), and Shirley repeats it in Child Star. But the story doesn’t really fit the facts. At the time of Harlow’s death, the screen rights to The Wizard of Oz belonged not to MGM but to Samuel Goldwyn, who had purchased them in 1933 for $40,000.

Shirley gets another point wrong in Child Star when she talks about who might play “the role of fourteen-year-old Dorothy”; she actually more than doubles Dorothy’s probable age. In L. Frank Baum’s first Oz book Dorothy’s age isn’t mentioned, but W.W. Denslow’s illustrations show a girl of six or seven, and internal evidence in later Oz books suggests that that’s about right. In other words, Dorothy in The [original] Wizard of Oz is almost exactly the age of Shirley Temple at the height of her career at Fox. It may well be that around that time Darryl Zanuck tried to obtain the rights as a vehicle for his biggest star (wouldn’t you?), but aside from him there wouldn’t have been a lot of interest in the book. In any case the point was moot; Goldwyn wasn’t selling (what he though he was going to do with the property is anybody’s guess).

Then things changed on December 21, 1937 when Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre in Los Angeles. It was an immediate smash hit — and suddenly there was a renewed interest in making movies out of fairy tales. In The Making of The Wizard of Oz Aljean Harmetz quotes a New York Times story of February 19, 1938 telling how Goldwyn was suddenly besieged with offers to take Oz off his hands: “Twentieth Century-Fox [sic] is reported anxious to purchase the book for Shirley Temple, but all offers have been rejected.”

Then MGM made Goldwyn an offer he couldn’t refuse, and the deal was finalized on June 3, 1938: MGM bought the rights to The Wizard of Oz from Goldwyn for $75,000. Louis B. Mayer, Ms. Harmetz says, tried to borrow Shirley from Zanuck, but to no avail. (Shirley claims Zanuck made a counter-offer to buy the rights from Mayer, but I question her reliability on that point; she may have been reporting second- or third-hand studio gossip or wishful thinking. It seems to me that if Zanuck couldn’t offer Goldwyn enough to get the rights from him, he wasn’t likely to offer enough to MGM when the price was $35,000 higher.)

In later years Arthur Freed, who always inflated his role in producing The Wizard of Oz, insisted he intended all along for Judy Garland to play Dorothy — even saying he would have refused to make it with anybody else. We can dismiss that. Freed was only a songwriter in 1938 with no track record as a producer (and he got no screen credit on Oz). If Louis B. Mayer could bring Gene Kelly into his office in 1951 and tell him to make Singin’ in the Rain with Debbie Reynolds (a nobody), he’d have had no problem ordering Freed to make The Wizard of Oz with Shirley Temple whether he liked it or not. And Freed would have done as he was told; he got where he was by sucking up to L.B. (to be fair, he stayed where he was by producing one great and profitable musical after another for nearly 20 years).

So…sorting all this out, it strikes me that the bottom line is this: In the mid-1930s, if anybody ever gave a serious thought to remaking The Wizard of Oz (there had been two silent versions), the obvious and only possible choice to play Dorothy would have been Shirley Temple, and that very idea came up more than once. But for whatever reason, 20th Century Fox never got control of the property. Samuel Goldwyn, who owned it, seems never to have seriously considered filming it. Then in 1938, when MGM pried the rights loose from Goldwyn, they tried to borrow Shirley but couldn’t. As Aljean Harmetz correctly points out, if it had ever come to a serious showdown between Shirley and Judy Garland for the role, Judy would certainly have lost. Ergo, in this universe at least, it was never going to happen, Hollywood gossip and later tales notwithstanding. “Sometimes,” as Shirley said, “the gods know best.”

For the picture Shirley actually did make next, the question of rights was never an issue — the story had recently drifted into the public domain.

Heidi

(released November 5, 1937)

According to Variety, Heidi was chosen for Shirley by public demand, as expressed in her fan mail — although the showbiz bible may simply have been parroting a studio press release. Either way, the role was a natural for Shirley. The source was a novel by Johanna Spyri (1827-1901), first published in the author’s native Switzerland in 1880. The book was instantly popular, and promptly translated from its original German into virtually every written language on Earth. The book was — and remains — so popular, in fact, that it’s surprising to realize that Shirley’s picture in 1937 was the first attempt to make a movie out of it (there have been over a dozen since).

To direct Heidi, Darryl Zanuck first approached Henry King, and he was an excellent choice. King’s directing career began in 1915 (and would stretch on to 1962), and he was one of that select group of directors who mastered moviemaking in the silent era, then adapted easily to the changing times when sound came in. By 1937, at Fox, he had already directed, among others, the first State Fair (’33) with Will Rogers and Janet Gaynor; Ramona (’36), Fox’s first Technicolor picture, from the Helen Hunt Jackson novel of old California; and Lloyds of London (also ’36), which made a star of Tyrone Power (who would work with King ten more times). Still to come were some of 20th Century Fox’s most important and successful pictures: Alexander’s Ragtime Band (’38), Jesse James (’39), The Song of Bernadette (’43), Wilson (’44), Twelve O’Clock High (’49), The Gunfighter (’50). King was the only director under contract to Fox who even approached the stature of John Ford (though King was a rather distant second at that), and if he had worked with Shirley it might have carried her farther along that fork in the road her career had taken with Wee Willie Winkie.

Alas, it was not to be. As King remembered it some 40 years later, he was on a busman’s holiday in Honolulu, doing prep work with the script for In Old Chicago, when he became stranded there by a steamship strike. Zanuck cabled him that In Old Chicago was being postponed and that he (Zanuck) wanted King to consider directing Heidi. “I immediately went to a bookstore in Honolulu, read it and didn’t think there was much of a movie in it. I don’t believe in fairies to begin with.”

It’s hard to imagine what King meant by that last sentence; Heidi is no fairy tale. Otherwise, his point is well taken — at first glance there isn’t much of a movie in Heidi. The story is unevenly weighted; most of the plot is stuffed into the first 240 pages (my edition runs to 404), followed by 140 pages of anticlimax before the story kicks in again for the last 20. For all that, however, the book paints a vivid picture of now-bygone country life in the Swiss Alps, and the characters have considerable charm, Heidi herself supremely so. It ought to have been right up King’s alley, but he didn’t see it that way; he was far more excited about In Old Chicago and wanted to concentrate on that. The prospect of working with Shirley was no inducement, he recalled telling Zanuck: “‘I’ve had my time directing children. I don’t want to start all over again.’ I had done Little Mary Sunshine and all those Baby Marie pictures way back, and that was all behind me.” (“Baby” Marie Osborne was a long-forgotten child star of the 1910s with whom King had made several pictures.)

With King taking a pass, the job of directing Heidi fell to Allan Dwan, whose movie career went back even further than King’s. Dwan began directing even before the advent of feature films, when directors on location wore six-shooters on their hips to protect against both the rattlesnakes in the Los Angeles hills and raiding thugs from Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company. By the time he retired in the late 1950s, Dwan would rack up a mind-boggling 403 credits (he claimed as many as a thousand more, but couldn’t be sure). Dwan is also the source of one of my favorite stories of those early wild-and-woolly days of moviemaking on the fly. He was with one such company on location in the wilds of Southern California, serving as a sort of paleo-location manager, when the director disappeared on a drunk. When several days passed without the man returning, Dwan cabled the higher-ups back in Chicago suggesting that the cast and crew be recalled; they wired back, “You direct.” Dwan called the gang together and put it to them: “Either I’m a director or you’re all out of a job.” Without exception they all said, “You’re the best damn director we ever saw.”

As that anecdote suggests, Dwan throughout his prolific career was more stage manager than creative artist, and that was the attitude he brought to Heidi. In Child Star Shirley quotes him in a later interview as saying, “I liked to avoid children, especially those that were ‘over.’ She had hit her peak and was sliding fast when I started working with her.” Shirley doesn’t say when or to whom Dwan said this, but he was clearly speaking from hindsight; in 1937 few people thought Shirley Temple was “over”. Now, we can see that Shirley’s career at Fox had indeed peaked — probably with Captain January, Poor Little Rich Girl, Stowaway and Wee Willie Winkie — but she had been number one at the box office in 1935 and 1936, and would continue to be in 1937 and 1938. Dwan overcame his hesitation at working with Shirley (she won him over, of course; she won everybody over — except perhaps Alice Faye), and he and Shirley went on to make two more pictures together. Shirley was by no means “sliding fast” when she made Heidi — but her slide started soon thereafter, and the pictures she made with Dwan were a part of it. Small wonder that years later he preferred to believe that she was already fading before he came along.

The story of Heidi hardly needs synopsizing; nearly everybody knows it — or thinks they do. A sweet little orphan girl is dumped by an unfeeling aunt with her grandfather, a bitter, reclusive hermit and a stranger to her. Then, just as Heidi is beginning to thaw the heart of the old man, the aunt returns and kidnaps Heidi away to be sold to a wealthy Frankfurt family as a companion for the crippled daughter of the house.

Screenwriters Walter Ferris and Julien Josephson grappled with the narrative fermata that sets in on page 240 of Johanna Spyri’s book, choosing to solve the problem in a way that was utilitarian but not really felicitous. In the book Heidi makes friends with the crippled Klara — in fact, with everyone in the household except Fraulein Rottenmaier, the starchy, humorless old maid housekeeper. But Heidi becomes so homesick that Klara’s doctor insists she be sent home to her grandfather. Then come those 140 pages of Heidi romping through the Alps with her friend Peter, the goatherd, and mending the hard feelings between her grandfather and the villagers below. All this time Heidi keeps in touch with Klara, who finally comes to visit when the doctor agrees her frail health is strong enough. In the clean Alpine air, and with the encouragement of Heidi and her grandfather, Klara’s health is restored and she’s able to leave her wheelchair and walk again.

Ferris and Josephson replaced all this pastoral cavorting with melodrama. Heidi doesn’t go home to her grandfather until the very end; before that the old man (Jean Hersholt) walks the 100 miles to Frankfurt in search of her, then stalks the city streets calling her name, sometimes missing her my mere seconds. Meanwhile, Fraulein Rottenmaier (Mary Nash) is upgraded (or downgraded) from a mere narrow-minded, stiff-necked stick-in-the-mud to a full-fledged villainess; she plots to keep Klara (Marcia Mae Jones) crippled and dependent in the hope that the girl’s father Herr Sesemann (Sidney Blackmer) will be moved to marry his “indispensable” housekeeper. When Heidi unwittingly thwarts Fraulein R. by teaching Klara to walk, the fraulein retaliates by — I am not making this up — trying to sell Heidi to a band of gypsies. Only the intervention of a cool-headed police captain clears the way for a happy ending back on Heidi’s mountain.

Heidi gets off to a promising start. The picture’s Lake Arrowhead
locations, combined with good special effects (probably the work
of Fred Sersen, Fox’s effects wizard) make a credible substitute for
Switzerland, and the early scenes of Heidi’s unquenchable good
cheer slowly charming her gruff, taciturn old grandfather — Shirley
once again winning over a crusty curmudgeon — are well-played
by Shirley and a nearly silent Hersholt. One particularly charming
touch is a lilting little melody that Heidi hums to herself as she
goes about her chores — and which the grandfather eventually
finds himself humming without even realizing it. So far the
movie has been absolutely faithful to the spirit — and
reasonably faithful to the letter — of Johanna Spyri’s
story.

This lasts precisely 19 minutes and 37 seconds.

Then disaster strikes — incredibly enough, in the form of exactly the sort of thing Darryl Zanuck said he didn’t want in Wee Willie Winkie. As Heidi and her grandfather sit at their cabin table, he ostensibly begins reading her a story about “The Magic Wooden Shoes”. The camera moves in on a woodcut in the book, and the picture dissolves to a quaint little Dutch scene by a storybook Zuider Zee, and there’s Shirley — or is it Heidi? — in blonde braids and bangs and a starched cap, singing about her shoes:

Have you seen my new shoes?

They are made out of wood.

Such nice little shoes.

Don’t you think they look good?

(The song is “In Our Little Wooden Shoes” by Lew Pollack and Sidney D. Mitchell, uncredited.) Then Shirley leads her companions, all of them dressed in adorable Hans Brinker costumes (the boys look like they all stepped off a can of house paint), in an energetic clog dance (staged by Sammy Lee, also uncredited), with Shirley soaring over their heads to land in a treetop, then turning to sail back to earth — or rather, to the stage floor — again.

Then, apropos of absolutely nothing whatsoever, the scene dissolves to an elegant marbled hall, with Shirley dolled up like a miniature Marie Antoinette, leading (presumably) the same troupe of children, now dressed like lords and ladies of the French court, in a genteel minuet to the same tune. Then the number segues back to that stagebound Holland and its two-dimensional windmills, and finally back again to Switzerland as the grandfather tucks the sleeping Heidi into her little bed.

There’s nothing really “wrong”, exactly, with all this, except for one thing: It doesn’t belong here. It has nothing to do with the life of a little girl in provincial Switzerland in 1880, but it has plenty to do with being Shirley Temple in 1937. This silly little number, coming when it does, wrecks Heidi beyond fixing. After this, we no longer believe we’re in Switzerland or, later, Frankfurt; we can’t possibly be anywhere but Hollywood. (The melodramatic blandishments of the script — selling Heidi to gypsies?? — and Dwan’s directing every scene at a headlong, breakneck pace, as if he has to be somewhere across town 15 minutes after calling cut, certainly don’t help.)

Shirley tells us that the number was inserted in the picture halfway through shooting. Whose bright idea was it? I blame Darryl Zanuck; nothing happened at his studio or went into his pictures that he didn’t know about and approve. What ever happened to “We don’t want to depend on any of her tricks” or “She should not be doing things because she is Shirley Temple, but because the situations — sound and believable — call for them“? I can only think — and this is pure speculation on my part — that Zanuck’s edicts in that story conference on Wee Willie Winkie were said simply to placate John Ford, as if Ford had said, “All right, Darryl, I’ll direct your Shirley Temple picture, but don’t try to saddle me with any of those cute little song-and-dance scenes; I won’t have it.” Maybe if Henry King had agreed to direct Heidi, those edicts would have stood. King might well have insisted, but not a director like Dwan.

At the time, Shirley enjoyed the number, enjoyed wearing those Dutch braids and bangs, enjoyed being flown on that invisible wire. In retrospect, writing in Child Star, she saw it as the turning point in her career. She called the “Wooden Shoes” number “a traditional Temple musical filler”, adding that “it marked the collapse of any studio resolve to build on the purely dramatic momentum first evident in Wee Willie Winkie.” With the same hindsight we can see that Shirley was right.

That’s in hindsight, however; no such thing was apparent at the time. In 1937, the picture was a major hit. Along with Wee Willie Winkie, Shirley’s only other picture that year, it kept her the number-one box office star, and Heidi became one of Shirley’s signature roles. Maybe even the signature role; to this day, it’s often the first picture mentioned when Shirley’s name comes up. Reviews were positive — better, in fact, than for Wee Willie Winkie. Variety’s “Char” called it “good for average Temple draw or better” (which it was), and said it “follows the original [novel] rather faithfully” (which it didn’t). In the Times, Frank S. Nugent was, for him, almost rhapsodic: “All of it has been framed handsomely in the snows of a Hollywood Switzerland, with a soft sepia (and blue) tinting to accentuate its dreamworld quality” (unlike Wee Willie Winkie, Heidi has not survived in that form). Nugent closed by admitting, “Shirley has scored another ‘coo.'”

But looking back, we can see the handwriting on the wall. For me, seeing Heidi again for the first time in nearly 60 years was an eye-opening shock. I had remembered it as one of Shirley’s best-loved pictures. In fact, it always perplexed me that the 1952 Swiss version, which I saw about the same time, stayed fresher in my memory over the decades. Seeing Shirley’s again, I’m no longer perplexed. Heidi is no doubt one of her best-loved pictures, but it’s not one of her best. Despite those very good early scenes, and some later ones like the scene where the grandfather accompanies Heidi to the church that he hasn’t visited in years (straight out of Frau Spyri’s novel), the picture never recovers from the miscalculation of “In Our Little Wooden Shoes”; it’s one of the head-scratching what-on-Earth-were-they-thinking moments of 1930s Hollywood. What they were thinking, I suspect — or more to the point, what Darryl Zanuck was thinking — was that his dictum about writing the story as if it were a Little Women or David Copperfield, about writing for Shirley as an actress and not depending on any of her tricks, was no longer operative. Henceforth, as far as 20th Century Fox was concerned, Shirley’s tricks would be her stock in trade. The studio was no longer interested in Shirley becoming an actress; instead, they would keep her a baby taking a bow for as long as they could get away with it.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 10

Posted on July 11, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 31, 2016

On July 30, 1936 there was a story conference on what would become Shirley’s next picture after Stowaway. At that conference, according to notes published in Rudy Behlmer’s Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox studio chief said:

I feel the only way to make this story is to disregard the formula of all the previous pictures Shirley Temple has appeared in to date…My idea…is to forget that it is a Shirley Temple picture. That is, not to forget that she is the star, but to write the story as if it were a Little Women or a David Copperfield…All the hokum must be thrown out. The characters must be made real, human, believable. Only then can we get a powerful, real story.

The role must be written for Shirley as an actress, and nothing sloughed over because Shirley is in it and therefore it will be good. We don’t want to depend on any of her tricks. She should not be doing things because she is Shirley Temple, but because the situations — sound and believable — call for them. In other words, write a role and let Shirley adapt herself to the picture.

This conference took place almost a full year before the picture was released. Without checking studio archives, we can’t be sure if Zanuck had already assigned a director, but given his determination to disregard the Shirley Temple formula, he probably had. In any case, the assignment went to John Ford, whom Zanuck had under non-exclusive contract. Ford had been directing since 1917, had already won the first of his four Oscars for The Informer at RKO, and was on the threshold of his own personal Golden Age, which would extend into the 1960s. According to Ford biographer Scott Eyman, Ford gave two accounts of his reaction to being assigned a Shirley Temple picture. In the one Eyman finds more likely, Ford said “my face fell atop the floor.” In the other, more consistent with the director’s self-image as a no-nonsense moviemaker, “I said ‘Great’ and we just went out and made the picture.”

Wee Willie Winkie

(released July 23, 1937)

Calling the picture “Rudyard Kipling’s” Wee Willie Winkie was a bit of an overstatement. The original story was published in 1888, when the future Nobel Prize winner was 22. It told of Percival William Williams, the six-year-old son of an army colonel stationed with his regiment in British India at the foot of the Khyber Pass on the indistinct border with Afghanistan. Percival has a penchant for nicknaming people, including himself, so he has adopted the name Wee Willie Winkie from one of his nursery-books. Winkie is bright but typically mischievous for a boy his age, and under the military discipline imposed by his father he is forever earning, then forfeiting, a succession of Good Conduct Badges.

One soldier that Winkie takes a particular shine to is Lt. Brandis, whom he nicknames “Coppy” for his copper-colored hair. His affection for Coppy is so great that when he sees Coppy “vehemently kissing” the daughter of one Major Allardyce he keeps the secret to himself.

Shortly thereafter, for yet another infraction, Winkie once more loses his Good Conduct Badge and is “confined to quarters under arrest” — what a later generation would call “grounded”. But when he sees Coppy’s Miss Allardyce, in a fit of willful independence, riding out beyond the river where all are forbidden to go, Winkie breaks arrest and rides after her on his little pony.

He catches up only when her own horse stumbles and throws her, twisting her ankle so that she cannot stand. She pleads with him to ride back to the post for help. But Winkie has been taught that “a man must always look after a girl”, and when he sees men approaching from the hills — bandits, perhaps, or worse — he dismounts and whips his pony, sending it galloping home without its rider. When the natives come across the boy and the injured young woman, they begin mulling over whether to take them hostage for ransom.

Winkie bravely stands up to them, to their great amusement, ordering them to send to the post for help. One of the natives, a former groom at the post, warns his fellows that disturbing these two will only be asking for trouble, and the debate among them goes on long enough for Winkie’s pony to reach home and for the alarm to be sounded. As the regiment rides to the rescue, the Afghans see the approaching soldiers and prudently melt back into the hills. Winkie and Miss Allardyce are brought back to the post, where Winkie is hailed as “a pukka hero”; his breaking arrest is forgiven, and he even regains his Good Conduct Badge.

Needless to say, in Ernest Pascal and Julien Josephson’s screenplay nearly all of this was changed. Percival was changed to Priscilla and given a widowed American mother (June Lang). The colonel backs up a generation, becoming Priscilla’s grandfather (C. Aubrey Smith), who sends for Priscilla and her mother when he learns they are living in poverty in America. Priscilla is still nicknamed Wee Willie Winkie, but her military discipline is self-imposed in an effort to become a soldier, since that seems to be the only type of person her grandfather the colonel likes. “Private” Winkie still takes a shine to Lt. “Coppy” Brandis (Michael Whalen, Shirley’s father in Poor Little Rich Girl), but he throws over Maj. Allardyce’s daughter to romance Winkie’s mother. While he’s doing that, Coppy’s duties as Winkie’s best friend among the soldiery devolve onto a new character, Sergeant MacDuff (Victor McLaglen).

In the closest Wee Willie Winkie comes to Kipling, young Pvt. Winkie again bravely faces and scolds an array of scornfully unassimilated Afghans, in this case led by the proud warlord Khoda Khan (Cesar Romero). But the movie goes Kipling one better: Winkie even averts a frontier war and brings peace when her grandfather Col. Williams and Khoda Khan agree to resolve their differences for the child’s sake.

It’s not uncommon these days to hear Wee Willie Winkie described as Shirley’s best picture at 20th Century Fox — and John Ford’s worst. As for Ford, he would go on to direct Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley for Darryl Zanuck, winning Oscars for the latter two. To be sure, Wee Willie Winkie isn’t in the same league with any of those. But the worst? Hardly. Take a gander at Tobacco Road, When Willie Comes Marching Home or What Price Glory sometime.

But Shirley’s best? Well, here those folks may be on to something. Ford, Pascal and Josephson followed Zanuck’s orders to write a role and “let Shirley adapt herself” to it, and not to depend on any of her tricks. She pouts but little (and only when called for), never breaks into dance, and sings only once, a couple of choruses of “Auld Lang Syne” at the bedside of Sgt. MacDuff as he lies mortally wounded after a skirmish with Khoda Khan’s men. The scene is a famous one, and justly so; it may be the best-played scene of Shirley’s entire career, staged and composed with masterful restraint by Ford and quietly scored by Alfred Newman. Winkie has no idea that MacDuff is dying; the knowledge has been kept from her. As she sings we see conflicting emotions flit across her face — affection for her good friend, confusion at the sense that something’s not right with him, then a banishing of the confusion, persuading herself that he’s only fallen asleep.

In Child Star Shirley devoted more space to Wee Willie Winkie than to any of her other pictures — partly because labor unrest was roiling the studio during production (the studio even shifted the shooting schedule, sending the company off for several weeks of location work at Chatsworth in the San Fernando Valley while demonstrations at the studio gates blew over), partly because her mother underwent surgery for a benign tumor during that time. But mostly it was because Wee Willie Winkie was her favorite, at least in retrospect. “Of all my films,” she wrote, “I rate Wee Willie Winkie the best, but for all the wrong reasons. It was best because of its manual of arms, the noisy marching around in military garb with brass buttons, my kilts bouncing. It was best because of daredevil stunts with snipers and stampeding horses. It was also best because I finally seemed to earn the professional respect of someone so blood-and-thunder macho as Ford.”

That respect was a while in coming. Try as she might at first, Shirley couldn’t charm Ford or coax him into collegial conversation. Where other directors had dandled her on their knees, he would merely stride past chewing on his handkerchief, ignoring her when he wasn’t giving her carefully detailed and specific direction, as if he didn’t trust her to do things right. Ford began to thaw when he saw how eagerly she embraced the close-order drill called for in the script, then a little more when he noticed how she didn’t flinch in the face of a rearing stunt-horse (remember that pony on the set of To the Last Man?) or a marksman shooting out a lamp over her head (actually, Ford wanted Winkie to flinch that time; the shot had to be redone). The clincher was this scene, a potentially dangerous shot of Winkie scampering to safety out of the path of a stampeding herd of horses, which Shirley volunteered to do without a double. No doubt about it, the kid had guts. Eleven years later, when they worked together on Fort Apache, Shirley would ask Ford to stand godfather for her first child, and he would agree.

In my notes on Captain January I quoted Graham Greene’s review in the London Spectator, in which he mentioned Shirley’s “oddly precocious body”, as voluptuous as Marlene Dietrich and “interestingly decadent”. Over Wee Willie Winkie he crossed a line. Writing in the highbrow magazine Night and Day (which he co-edited) on October 28, 1937, he said:

“The owners of a child star are like leaseholders — their property diminishes in value every year…Miss Shirley Temple’s case, though, has peculiar interest: Infancy is her disguise, her appeal is more secret and more adult. Already two years ago she was a fancy little piece (real childhood, I think, went out after The Littlest Rebel). In Captain January she wore trousers with the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich: her neat and well-developed rump twisted in the tap-dance: her eyes had a sidelong searching coquetry. Now in Wee Willie Winkie, wearing short kilts, she is completely totsy. Watch her swaggering stride across the Indian barrack-square: hear the gasp of excited expectation from her antique audience when the sergeant’s palm is raised: watch the way she measures a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity. Adult emotions of love and grief glissade across the mask of childhood, a childhood skin-deep.

“It is clever, but it cannot last. Her admirers — middle-aged men and clergymen — respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her well-shaped and desirable little body, packed with enormous vitality, only because the safety curtain of story and dialogue drops between their intelligence and their desire.”

Greene closed out with a left-handed compliment, noting that the story was “a long way after Kipling. But we needn’t be sour about that. Both stories are awful, but on the whole Hollywood’s is the better.”

Fox was less than mollified; they sued for libel, charging that Greene had accused the studio of “procuring” Shirley “for immoral purposes”. Greene fled to Mexico, and the British court found for the plaintiffs, ordering damages of 3,500 pounds sterling, 500 of it to come from Greene personally. (The amount of the judgment was about $17,500 at the time; multiply by 20 to get an approximation of the amount in today’s dollars.) From Mexico Greene wrote his Night and Day colleague Elizabeth Bowen: “I found a cable waiting for me in Mexico City asking me to agree to apologise to that little bitch Shirley Temple — so I suppose the case has now been settled with the maximum publicity.” In Child Star Shirley wrote about the dust-up with some amusement, noting that at the time the whole thing had gone pretty much over her head.

Students of Graham Greene’s prose have spent decades parsing Greene’s review, digging for his intent. Some say he was kidding (“Shirley Temple = Marlene Dietrich? Seriously?”), others that he was satirizing Shirley’s handlers or her audience. Still others contend that Greene was obviously right, that the sexualization of Shirley Temple on Fox’s part was conscious and deliberate (“I’m obsessed with sex?? You’re the one showing me all these dirty pictures!”). Personally, I won’t weigh in on all that — except to say that very often, a review tells us more about the reviewer than it does about the work under discussion.

In any event, other reviews were more circumspect, if hardly more complimentary. The New Yorker’s John Mosher, sniffy as ever, sniffed, “Miss Temple’s talent is rather overexploited at times, and she seems just a bit too pert. Mr. Kipling’s children were never allowed to take over the platform in quite this fashion.” Variety’s “Flin” liked the picture well enough, but tempered his opinion (as Variety often did) with marketing advice, saying that “as a roadshow attraction at advanced admission prices, ‘Winkie’ is too long for the continuous type of film theatres. Temple is boxoffice dynamite because of the kids who flock to see her, but youngsters can’t sit still for an hour and three-quarters. They’re squirming all over the place; however, reducing footage for general exhibition will be easy. It also is essential.” And the New York Times’s Frank S. Nugent ended his cease-fire, which had begun with Stowaway: “The picture, on its unassuming and frankly sentimental surface, is a pleasing enough little fiction, sure to delight every Temple addict and likely to win the grudging approval even of those who, like myself, are biding their time until she grows up, becomes gawky and is a has-been at 15.”

WWW-frame05a-Lang,-WhalenW Seen today, Wee Willie Winkie bears out Shirley’s opinion more than it does Mosher’s, Flin’s or Nugent’s. The picture is certainly not too long. Children may squirm during the protracted love scenes between Michael Whalen and June Lang, but so do adults. Both were bland Fox contract players on an unstoppable career path toward B pictures and, at the onset of middle age, television. Whalen’s dark good looks were about to be rendered irrelevant by the rise of the far more charismatic Tyrone Power. As for Lang (Shirley’s “mother” was only 11 years older than she was), within seven years she would be a nameless, uncredited “Goldwyn Girl” behind Danny Kaye in Up in Arms, and would finish her career with one-off guest shots on TV cop shows in the ’50s and ’60s. Whalen and Lang were (and remain) attractive and inoffensive, but they lack the chemistry — with either the audience or each other — that Robert Young and Alice Faye showed in Stowaway, or Faye and Jack Haley in Poor Little Rich Girl. (The blue-green of this frame-cap, like the sepia of others, reproduces the tinted stock Wee Willie Winkie sported on its original release.)

John Ford was probably no more interested in Lang and Whalen’s romantic subplot than we are today. What he emphasized in Wee Willie Winkie was the theme he would later explore more deeply, and more famously, in his “cavalry trilogy” of 1948-50 (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande): military life on an often hostile frontier, with an almost fetishistic reverence for its rugged pomp and pageantry. And in the chemistry department, Wee Willie Winkie makes up in Victor McLaglen, C. Aubrey Smith and Cesar Romero what it lacks in June Lang and Michael Whalen. As Scott Eyman astutely notes in his biography of Ford, the on-screen relationship between McLaglen’s Sgt. MacDuff and Pvt. Winkie mirrors the one between Ford and Shirley between takes: “eye-rolling impatience at the thought of being saddled with such a ridiculous apparition, followed by grudging respect, ending in a protective friendship.” C. Aubrey Smith brings a British lion’s dignity to the now-standard role of curmudgeon for Shirley to win over. And Romero’s Khoda Khan, like the American Indians in Ford’s later trilogy, is an adversary, even an antagonist, without ever becoming a villain.

A key difference between Wee Willie Winkie and the cavalry trilogy, of course, and what makes it particularly appealing, is that we see the story not through the eyes of John Wayne or Henry Fonda or Maureen O’Hara, but through those of an eight-year-old American girl who comes to love the panoply and close-order drill just as much as her crusty old grandfather does. Like the Winkie in Kipling’s original story, the movie’s female version becomes the mascot and hero(ine) of the regiment, and she returns their respect and affection.

For Shirley’s next picture, 20th Century Fox would once again mine the deep vein of 19th century European literature. This time, however, Darryl Zanuck appears to have had second thoughts about his determination not to rely on any of Shirley’s tricks.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 9

Posted on July 7, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 31, 2016

During shooting on Poor Little Rich Girl, director Irving Cummings drew Shirley’s mother aside and warned her that (as Shirley recalled it in Child Star) “the studio would have to find better stories for me; I had lost that baby quality and was getting an emotional understanding, ‘like Helen Hayes when she started.'” Cummings’s point was well taken, but like contract players at other studios, Shirley was at the mercy of the 20th Century Fox front office, and their interest was in keeping her a baby as long as possible. Certainly that was how they played it for her next picture.

Dimples

(released October 11, 1936)

I’m going to pass over Dimples as quickly as duty will allow because, like Now and Forever, it’s a bit of a dud, and for similar reasons. The setting is New York in 1850; Shirley plays Chalvia Dolores Appleby, known by all as “Dimples”. As in Now and Forever, she’s the child of an unregenerate grifter, only this time it’s not her father but her grandfather, “Professor” Eustace Appleby (Frank Morgan). The Professor calls himself a music teacher of “the Pianoforte, the Bugle, the Melodion, the Drum, also Bird Calls”, but mainly he just stands in the crowd shilling while Dimples and his other “students” sing, dance and play their instruments in the streets. Then he starts the contributions when Dimples passes the hat and, while other bystanders are dropping coins in, he works the crowd picking pockets. In another similarity to Now and Forever, Dimples catches the eye of wealthy old Mrs. Drew (Helen Westley), who wants to lift her out of the Bowery poverty in which she lives with the Professor. At the same time, Mrs. Drew becomes estranged from her nephew Allen (Robert Kent) when he becomes romantically involved with (gasp!) an actress whom he decides to star in a production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin — in which he later hires Dimples to play Little Eva.

Unlike Shirley’s character in Now and Forever, Dimples is wise to her reprobate forebear and goes out of her way to shield him. When he steals a clock from Mrs. Drew’s house, she returns it, telling the kind lady that she stole it and the Professor made her bring it back. When Allen Drew wants to hire Dimples for Uncle Tom’s Cabin but has no part for the Professor, she turns the role down until he agrees to give the Professor a job. In this way and others, the Professor becomes the child and Dimples the guardian.

In Child Star Shirley remembered Frank Morgan’s tireless efforts to upstage her and steal focus during their scenes — fiddling with his cuffs, flourishing his handkerchief, placing his stovepipe hat on a table between her and the camera so that she couldn’t be in the shot without stepping off her mark and out of the light. (“Both of us knew perfectly well what he was doing. There was no way I could cope, short of biting at his fingers.”) Director William A. Seiter was on to Morgan’s tricks too; in this scene, where Dimples sings “Picture Me Without You” (one of four pleasantly forgettable songs provided by Jimmy McHugh and Ted Koehler), Seiter made Morgan sit in a chair with his back to the camera. (“When this picture is over,” cracked producer Nunnally Johnson, “either Shirley will have acquired a taste for Scotch whiskey or Frank will come out with curls.”)

Shirley’s consternation is understandable, but the problem with the Professor isn’t Morgan’s performance — he’s as delightful as ever — it’s the character. The man is simply no damn good. There isn’t an honest bone in his body; every word that passes his lips is a lie, and he’ll steal anything that isn’t bolted to the floor. He never makes the slightest effort to reform the way Gary Cooper’s Jerry Day tries to do in Now and Forever — at least not until the waning seconds of the picture, when it comes much too late to be convincing. Variety’s reviewer “Odec” described the Professor as “Micawberish”, but that’s a slander on the great character from David Copperfield. Wilkins Micawber is merely feckless and improvident; Eustace Appleby is what later generations would call a sociopath and pathological narcissist — Robert Kent’s Allen Drew is much closer to the mark when he denounces the Professor as a “senile old scoundrel.” On top of that, he’s stupid, and Dimples’s frequent efforts to cover for him (which convince no one) only make her look like a fool. The Professor’s bumbling perfidy casts a sour pall over every scene he’s in, and Frank Morgan, despite his skill at stealing scenes (maybe even because of it), is powerless to make this good-for-nothing tinhorn Fagin likeable.

Dimples does have its pluses. Bill Robinson, doing off-camera duty this time as dance director, gave Shirley some sprightly syncopated routines, like this one here to McHugh and Koehler’s “He Was a Dandy”, flanked by Thurman Black and Jesse Scott. The picture sports a few anachronisms. It’s explicitly set in 1850, but it opens on a shot of a campaign poster for Franklin Pierce and involves a stage production of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; both Pierce’s election and the novel’s publication didn’t happen until 1852. Still, there’s a nice period feel to it, and the glimpse of the 1850s American theater is pretty authentic. Maybe too authentic — the play’s Uncle Tom and Topsy (and, for plot reasons, Frank Morgan) appear in blackface, as do such genuine African Americans as Stepin Fetchit and the Hall Johnson Choir (in those days even people of color, on the rare occasions they were allowed to perform with whites, were required to “black up”).

Neither “Odec” in Variety nor Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times was overly impressed with Dimples. Odec assured exhibitors that they’d make money as usual on Shirley’s latest, “but it won’t be due to the fact that ‘Dimples’ is solid, expertly fashioned entertainment. It’s anything but that.” Nugent, for his part, was downright exasperated: “Why they bother with titles, or with plots either for that matter, is beyond us…Now leave us alone a while; we want to brood.”

Just one more point about Dimples before we move on. In Child Star Shirley recalled filming Little Eva’s death scene (which she plays much the way a child actress in the 1850s would probably have done it), and actor Paul Stanton, as Eva’s grieving father, sobbing so broadly that he shook the bed she was lying on. However, Shirley transplanted the recollection from Dimples to The Little Colonel the year before, and she identified her over-emoting stage father as John Lodge, who played her “real” father in that picture. Such are the occasional vagaries of even the most reliable memory.

Stowaway

(released December 18, 1936)

Stowaway gave Shirley an exotic setting, a story that didn’t require her to carry the show all by herself, and cast-mates who were strong enough to share the load. Shirley played Barbara Stewart, nicknamed “Ching-Ching”, the orphaned daughter of missionaries in Sanchow, China. At the approach of bandits from the hills, she’s about to be orphaned again — or worse — because her guardians the Kruikshanks (also missionaries) refuse to flee from the approaching marauders. Defying them, the wise local magistrate Sun Lo (Philip Ahn) spirits Ching-Ching away with a boatman to Shanghai.

But upon arrival, the boatman robs the sleeping Ching-Ching and disappears, leaving her to wander the city alone. That’s how she meets Tommy Randall (Robert Young, on loan from MGM), a wandering American playboy. After their encounter, the girl falls asleep in the rumble seat of Tommy’s automobile while he goes roaring off on a drunk with another wealthy globetrotter (Eugene Pallette). Tommy’s valet Atkins (Arthur Treacher) tracks his employer from bar to bar and manages to get him aboard their departing ship safe and (reasonably) sound, along with Tommy’s auto — and, unbeknownst to all, the sleeping Ching-Ching.

When the befuddled Ching-Ching awakens the next morning, she’s immediately spotted for a stowaway and chased from deck to deck. She takes refuge in the stateroom of Susan Parker (Alice Faye) and Susan’s future mother-in-law Mrs. Hope (Helen Westley), on their way to Bangkok to join Susan’s intended. Before long, Ching-Ching is reunited with her “Uncle” Tommy; for his part, Tommy agrees to stand good for the child’s passage until her guardians can be contacted. Also, even through his pounding hangover, he can see that Susan is the most beautiful woman aboard ship. Susan’s eyes are clearer than his, but it’s plain to see that the attraction is mutual.

On the voyage from Shanghai to Hong Kong, Ching-Ching plays unwitting matchmaker between Tommy and Susan, to the consternation of Mrs. Hope, who urgently cables her son Richard (Allan Lane) not to wait till they reach Bangkok but to fly at once to meet the boat at Hong Kong. The ever-obedient Richard does as he’s told, and the inevitable romantic complications arise, with Susan eventually cold-shouldering Tommy when she mistakenly thinks he has returned to his ne’er-do-well ways. In the meantime, the ship’s captain (Robert Greig) learns from the American consulate that Ching-Ching’s guardians the Kruikshanks have paid with their lives for their refusal to flee those approaching bandits; the child will have to be returned to Shanghai and the orphanage there.

Tommy persuades Susan to adopt Ching-Ching when she and Richard are married, promising to take the child off their hands as soon as his lawyers can arrange it. But Richard, under the influence of his domineering mother, will have none of it; he sees no reason to do Tommy any favors and he doesn’t give a hoot about Ching-Ching. Shocked by his (actually, their) callous attitude, Susan breaks the engagement. Soon thereafter, Tommy, seeing Ching-Ching about to be sent off to a life of “marching in lock-step and eating gruel”, desperately begs Susan to marry him — in name only, he assures her, just so he can adopt Ching-Ching, with a quickie Reno divorce and a generous settlement for Susan as soon as they reach the States.

Well, we can all guess where this is headed, and sure enough it gets there — with a wise judge in Reno (J. Edward Bromberg) consulting with Ching-Ching before denying a divorce petition for probably the first time in the history of the State of Nevada.

Stowaway reunited Shirley with director William A. Seiter (and also with writer William Conselman, who had done so well by Shirley on Bright Eyes and The Little Colonel, writing this time with Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, from a story by Samuel G. Engel). Without the odious Professor who blighted Dimples (and without Frank Morgan’s upstaging stunts), Seiter was able to do much better by Shirley, mainly by not forcing her to be the whole show.

Not that she doesn’t have plenty to do. Ching-Ching is still the fulcrum of the plot, as Marky was in Little Miss Marker, serving as matchmaker for Robert Young and Alice Faye almost exactly the way Marky did for Adolphe Menjou and Dorothy Dell. And life in a remote village deep in the heart of China hasn’t deprived Ching-Ching of a keen grasp of American popular music (which she credits to “Sun Lo’s phonograph”): When she visits an amateur-hour theater in Hong Kong with Tommy and Susan, Ching-Ching takes the stage to sing “You Gotta S-M-I-L-E to Be H-A-Double-P-Y” (by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel). Then she reprises the song in the style of Al Jolson, then Eddie Cantor (that’s some record collection that Sun Lo has!) — and finally a la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, with a white-tie-and-tails dummy strapped to her toes that just happens to be sitting backstage.

Stowaway‘s take-away hit was Gordon and Revel’s “Good Night, My Love” — introduced by Shirley as a lullaby learned at her late mother’s knee, then later reprised by Alice as a love song, with a new “grown-up” lyric. (In Child Star Shirley confessed to a private, childish jealousy over Alice getting the last word on “her” song. “Instantly I knew her rendition had finessed mine. Hers was deeper-throated, more resonant, and her facial expressions insinuated much that I sensed was important without knowing why.” Could this be a glimpse of conditions on the set that would lead Alice decades later to speak of “that Temple child”?)

Alice also sang “One Never Knows, Does One?”, another one by Gordon and Revel, this time with no little-girl version for Shirley. Then Shirley closed out the show with “That’s What I Want for Christmas”, written by the uncredited Gerald Marks and Irving Caesar. This last number comes at the very end, after the story has been brought to a satisfying conclusion, and it plays almost like a curtain-call encore. Evidently it was added at the last minute to exploit the movie’s holiday engagement at New York’s Roxy picture palace (it didn’t sift down to the rest of the country until after the turn of 1937).

Reviews of Stowaway were a big step up. Variety’s “Bige” called it “a nifty Shirley Temple comedy with musical trimmings” and said it was “apt to regain whatever ground has been lost by the kid star’s last few efforts.” (For the record, Shirley’s “last few efforts” had been Dimples, Poor Little Rich Girl, Captain January, The Littlest Rebel and Curly Top. Apparently Dimples had left a really bad taste.)

At the New York Times, Stowaway appears to have restored Frank S. Nugent’s faith in both 20th Century Fox and Shirley in particular (“[a] clever little baggage when she is kept in her place…”). “For the first time in several starts,” he wrote, “she has an amusing script behind her, an agreeable adult troupe with her and a clever director before her. The combination has produced a thoroughly entertaining romantic comedy, unquestionably the best thing the gifted moppet has done since ‘Little Miss Marker.’ It practically convinces us there is a Santa Claus.” Even John Mosher, at that citadel of sniffy sophistication The New Yorker, conceded, “I am sure that this new film of [Miss Temple’s] should be the bright spot, perhaps the brightest spot, of the holiday season for her great following.”

Stowaway is indeed a charmer, the more so since Shirley doesn’t have to supply all the charm. Robert Young and Alice Faye have a playful romantic chemistry, and he’s in good comic form while she’s in excellent voice; Arthur Treacher is amusing as Tommy Randall’s valet, in a state of perpetual nonplussedness; Helen Westley, as the old harridan Mrs. Hope, offers a clever change from her cuddly matron in Dimples; Eugene Pallete is, as always, a hoot playing a shipboard lush (albeit too briefly this time); and as the ship’s captain, Robert Greig — that stalwart Australian character actor whom audiences are always happy to see but whose name they can never remember — adds his own patented grace notes of dignity.

Watching Shirley’s movies in succession today, something is beginning to make itself noticeable by the time one gets to Stowaway, and it bears on Irving Cummings’s remark to Mother Gertrude about Shirley “losing that baby quality and getting an emotional understanding.” Remember, at this point it’s been just a hair over three years since the day Shirley auditioned for Lew Brown and Jay Gorney on Stand Up and Cheer!; since then Shirley has made 15 pictures. She’s no longer a toddler, as Cummings noted, and as for “emotional understanding”, she has certainly come to understand how cute she is. She has by no means lost the “spontaneity and cheer” that Mordaunt Hall noticed in Little Miss Marker, or the “unspoiled freshness of manner” that Andre Sennwald found the saving grace of Now and Forever. But she no longer has the element of surprise on her side, and from her mother’s coaching her to “sparkle” she’s begun to develop tricks: the carefully calculated giggle, the pumping fists, the pouting lips — the mannerisms that have provided fodder for countless parodists since the 1930s.

This is noticeable now only by viewing in rapid succession (and closely, and more than a few times) the movies that audiences in the mid-’30s saw only once, and spread out over years. But Darryl Zanuck had already noticed it himself, and he decided to shake up the formula a little before it got too stale. And so it was that Shirley, for the first time in her career, got the opportunity to star for a truly great director.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 8

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 30, 2016

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Since I last posted on The Littlest Rebel I’ve had a chance to examine both Edward Peple’s play and novel of that title (both were copyrighted in 1911, so it’s impossible, without input from Mr. Peple’s heirs and descendants, to know whether the play was based on the novel or vice versa). It’s clear that Variety’s reviewer “Land” misspoke when he said there was “no trace” of Peple’s play in Edwin J. Burke’s script. In fact, Burke followed Peple’s broad outline quite faithfully, making such changes as the passage of 25 years and the talent on hand would call for. The stagebound bombast of the play’s dialogue is purged entirely, as is the “colored” humor that was hopelessly dated by 1935 (albeit replaced with humor that looks equally dated to us today). In the play, Virgie saves her father from the firing squad by appealing for clemency to Gen. U.S. Grant; having her appeal to President Lincoln in the movie was an obvious improvement. And, of course, song-and-dance opportunities were inserted for Shirley and Bill Robinson because it would have been plainly stupid not to do so.

“Land” was being either forgetful, ignorant or unjust. If he wanted to see a movie that really had no trace of its original source, he need only have waited for the picture that 20th Century Fox hustled Shirley into immediately after shooting wrapped on Captain January.

Poor Little Rich Girl

(released June 25, 1936)

Don’t be misled by the picture’s title as it appears on the cover of the sheet music below (and on several of the posters and lobby cards); the title was Poor Little Rich Girl, with no “The“. Poor Little Rich Girl has a distinction it shares with Our Little Girl: They are the only two pictures from Shirley’s reign as Fox’s box-office queen (before and after the merger) that are not available on DVD; both can be seen only on out-of-print colorized VHS tapes.

There’s another distinction that Poor Little Rich Girl has all to itself: It’s one of Shirley’s decidedly odd, even bizarre, pictures. The oddity begins with the screenplay credits. Once again, as with Captain January, the script is by Sam Hellman, Gladys Lehman and Harry Tugend, this time “suggested by the stories of Eleanor Gates and Ralph Spence.”

In order to clarify that “stories of” credit, we need to go back to the beginning, and it begins with Eleanor Gates (1875-1951). She published her novel The Poor Little Rich Girl in 1912, then turned it into a play that ran for 160 performances on Broadway the following year. The novel tells of seven-year-old Gwendolyn (for the play her age was upped to 11 and she was played by 15-year-old Viola Dana, the future silent movie star). To all appearances, Gwendolyn is a pampered child of wealth and privilege, but she’s really lonely, confused and unhappy. She’s neglected by her workaholic father and social-climbing mother, who leave her in the hands of servants who bully her and treat her like a nuisance. One night her nursemaid, eager for an evening off, gives her an overdose of a sleeping medication that puts Gwendolyn into a near-death coma. In her delirium she has a bizarre Alice in Wonderland-style dream in which all her waking fears, confusion and insecurity take literal and symbolic form. By the time the crisis has passed and she is out of danger, her repentant parents have realized how important she is to them and vowed to neglect her no more. The play was filmed in 1917, with reasonable fidelity, and starring Mary Pickford.

A casual reading of Poor Little Rich Girl‘s credits might seem to imply that Miss Gates and Ralph Spence collaborated on the “stories”, but they didn’t; they may not even have ever met. Spence (1890-1949) was a writer of intertitles during the silent era who was famous for adding spice to otherwise pedestrian pictures (“All bad little movies when they die go to Ralph Spence,” read a full-page ad he took out in a Hollywood trade paper). Why he got story credit on Poor Little Rich Girl might have remained a mystery, but Shirley herself offers a convincing explanation in Child Star. It seems two writers filed a nuisance suit over Poor Little Rich Girl, claiming it had been stolen from a story they wrote on spec for Shirley and submitted to Fox in 1934. Shirley says Eleanor Gates herself resolved the issue by attesting that the title was hers, but the picture’s plot was taken from Spence’s story “Betsy Takes the Air”. So if Shirley’s recollection is right (and it sounds reasonable to me), 20th Century Fox bought Poor Little Rich Girl‘s title from Eleanor Gates and its story from Ralph Spence. In any case, one thing is abundantly clear: Fox may have made all the right payments to avoid any possible hassle, but Poor Little Rich Girl is in no way a remake of Mary Pickford’s 1917 The Poor Little Rich Girl, nor is it based on Eleanor Gates’s novel or play.

It is, however, about a poor little rich girl. Shirley plays Barbara Barry, the daughter of young widower Richard Barry (Michael Whalen), multi-millionaire owner of Barry’s Beauty Soap. Barbara is pampered to the point of absolute boredom, with no friends or playmates. If she sneezes more than once in an hour, she’s shunted off to bed by her nursemaid Collins (Sara Haden). Mrs. Woodward, the housekeeper (Jane Darwell), convinces Barbara’s father to enroll the girl in a private school where she can be among children her own age, and he arranges for Collins to take the girl to the school in the Adirondacks that Barbara’s late mother once attended.

While waiting for the car to take them to the station, Barbara asks Collins what she’ll do while Barbara’s away at school.”I’m going to take a little vacation,” Collins tells her. Barbara asks what a vacation is. “It’s a rest, dear. It means getting away from people you’ve been with every day and seeing new faces. You really become another person on a vacation.”

The words leave a fateful impression on Barbara. When they get to the station, Collins stops to send a telegram telling the school that Barbara is on her way. That’s when she misses her purse; she must have dropped it as she got out of the car. She tells Barbara to wait, and rushes outside to search. There she’s run down by a car and winds up in the hospital, unconscious and unidentified.

Meanwhile, back in the station, Barbara gets tired of waiting and decides to take a “little vacation” of her own — and the “other person” she decides to become is Betsy Ware, an orphan in her favorite series of stories that Mrs. Woodward has been reading to her. In this guise she meets Jimmy Dolan and his wife Jerry (Jack Haley and Alice Faye), vaudevillians down on their luck and looking to break into radio. Taking little “Betsy” into their act, they rename her “Bonnie Dolan” and make the rounds as “Dolan, Dolan and Dolan” — and sure enough, before you can say “audition” they’ve landed starring spots on a radio show. On top of that, their show is sponsored by the Peck Soap Co., arch-competitor to Barry’s Beauty Soap, and little Barbara/Betsy/Bonnie has charmed the socks off cranky old Simon Peck (Claude Gillingwater), who had long vowed never to sponsor a radio program. All this happens within two days, while Barbara’s father, who assumes his daughter is safely ensconced at school in the Adirondacks, is romancing the Peck Soap Co.’s head of advertising (Gloria Stuart).

Well, all of this gets sorted out in time for a happy fadeout — that is, for everyone except poor Collins, the nursemaid, whom we last see comatose in the hospital while doctors puzzle over her identity, and who is never heard from again.

And then there’s this character. He’s never identified by name, so I can’t even say who the actor is (if there are any name-the-unknown-actor buffs out there who can enlighten me, I’ll be eternally grateful). Anyhow, this guy shows up shortly after Barbara leaves the train station to embark on her “little vacation”. He stalks her for the rest of the movie, following her everywhere she goes and eavesdropping on her conversations with the people she meets. At one point he accosts her in the hallway of the apartment house where she’s staying with the Dolans, and he offers to buy her some peppermint candy if she’ll walk down to the corner with him. He calls her a “cute little trick” and tries to get her to tell him who her real daddy is. Who is this guy?? A kidnapper for ransom? A child molester? His presence is never explained, but he gives Poor Little Rich Girl a gruesome undercurrent of creepy menace that’s hard to square with the picture’s musical comedy trappings; he’s like a scorpion on a wedding cake. No two ways about it, the Hellman-Lehman-Tugend script for Poor Little Rich Girl is one screwy piece of work.

The movie’s saving grace is its score by Mack Gordon and Harry Revel, one of the best ever composed for one of Shirley’s pictures and one of the few that can properly be called a score as opposed to simply a collection of songs. Gordon and Revel’s numbers are clever, catchy and full of surprises. This is charmingly demonstrated in the very first song, “Oh, My Goodness”, which Barbara sings to four of her dolls after being banished to her bedroom for excessive sneezing. She begins by bemoaning her fun-deprived life:

I wanna make mudpies

In fact I’d like to be a mess

I wanna make mudpies

I know that I’d find happiness

If I got jam on my fingers, chocolate on my face

And molasses all over my dress

Then the number segues into the song proper, as Barbara scolds the dolls for their naughty behavior:

You’re the only friends I’ve ever had

But one minute you’re good

And the very next minute you’re bad

At times I ought to hate you

You make me feel so blue

But honest I can’t hate you

When you smile at me the way you do

Oh…

My…

Goodness!

…and then, exactly the right touch: the dolls jump up and dance for her. The whole scene is a perfectly delightful expression of the loneliness of a friendless little girl, presented in song (by Shirley) and dance (by the dolls).

Other songs round out the musical program with variety and a satisfying range of styles. There are spoofs of commercial jingles in the ditties for the competing soap companies, “Buy a Bar of Barry’s” and “Wash Your Necks with a Cake of Peck’s”. A standard love song, “When I’m with You”, introduced by an unbilled Tony Martin at the very beginning of his career — and one year before his three-year marriage to Alice Faye. The song is then reprised by Barbara, singing to her father (and including the rather alarming line, “Marry me and let me be your wife.”). These and other songs, often heard in different forms in the background, on pianos, hand-organs and what-not, add to the varied musical texture of Poor Little Rich Girl.

A highlight comes when Dolan, Dolan and Dolan makeemd_wKe their debut on the Peck’s Soap Hour with “You’ve Gotta Eat Your Spinach, Baby”. The number begins with Jimmy singing a conventional love song, which Jerry turns into a playful flirt-song. Then “Bonnie” stalks on and the number morphs into a sort of American variation on a Gilbert and Sullivan patter song: the girl sings a manifesto of youthful rebellion (“No-o-o-o spinach!…Halle-loooo-jah!”); Jimmy and Jerry counter with a stern assertion of adult authority (“Children have to do as they are told…Children shouldn’t be so very bold”), resulting in a sullen surrender (“Yes, sir…yes, ma’am…”):

Once the conflicts have been cleared up, and the Barry’s/Peck’s rivalry resolved with a merger, Poor Little Rich Girl goes out on a high note: a bravura song-and-dance number, “Military Man” (light on the song, very heavy on the dance). Shirley remembered nerves getting frazzled when she, Jack Haley and Alice Faye met to post-dub their taps to a playback of the silent image of their dance. All three knew the routine cold, but with no music to guide them, not even a metronome or choreographer Jack Haskell to give them the beat, matching their tap sounds to their mutely dancing picture proved tricky in the extreme. They finally got it, of course, and in recognition of their hard work I include this colorized clip here. Besides, it’s a whole lot of fun:

Years later, Alice Faye shared her memories of Poor Little Rich Girl with her great fan W. Franklyn Moshier, author of the self-published The Films of Alice Faye (which was picked up by Stackpole Books in 1974 and published as The Alice Faye Movie Book), and Frank Moshier shared those memories with me when I knew him in the early ’70s. Evidently, Alice rankled at having to play second fiddle to this eight-year-old; according to Frank, she never talked about “Shirley”, it was always “that Temple child”. Alice told Frank, and Frank told me, stories of Shirley throwing tantrums on the set — red-faced, stomping, screaming “Miss Faye pushed me! Miss Faye pushed me!” Frank had the good sense not to include such tales in The Films of Alice Faye, but he did assert that “while pure and wholesome in appearance and the darling of everyone from Key West to Puget Sound, Shirley was more than a little difficult to work with.”

Nonsense. I didn’t believe these stories in 1972 and I don’t believe them now. They simply fly in the face of everything — everything — that everybody else who ever worked with Shirley had to say about her. We can only speculate on what prompted such melodramatic yarns; both Shirley and Alice — and for that matter, Frank Moshier — are beyond asking about it now. In any event, Alice Faye was not through playing second fiddle to Shirley Temple. Within a very few months, she’d be doing it again.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 7

Posted on June 16, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 30, 2016

The creation of 20th Century Fox was announced as a merger, but it was really a friendly takeover. Darryl Zanuck (former production head at Warner Bros.) and Joseph Schenck (former president of United Artists) had formed 20th Century Pictures in 1933 as an independent concern, renting equipment and studio-and-office space from UA. In two years 20th Century had produced 18 pictures, all but one of which had made money, and several of which had made quite a lot: Folies Bergere de Paris, The House of Rothschild, The Affairs of Cellini, The Call of the Wild, Les Miserables, etc. But Zanuck got his hackles up when UA wouldn’t sell any of its stock to 20th Century, and he started looking around.

Enter Sidney Kent, president of Fox Film Corp. When Kent entered into merger negotiations with Zanuck and Schenck, he probably had visions of “Fox-20th Century Pictures”, thinking he was co-opting the rising competition and bringing a hot young producer into the Fox fold. But he didn’t figure on the drive and energy of Darryl F. Zanuck.

Neither did Winfield Sheehan. The Fox production chief knew there’d be room for only one chief at the new studio, and he braced himself for a struggle. But he was overmatched; Zanuck was younger, more aggressively ambitious — and, frankly, he had a better record at the box office. By the end of July 1935 Sheehan had taken a $420,000 buyout and left the company. Sidney Kent stayed on as president, at $180,000 a year, plus $25,000 as president of National Theatres Corp., Fox’s distribution affiliate. Just to show who 20th Century Fox’s real key figure was, Zanuck was made vice president in charge of production at $260,000 a year, plus ten percent of the gross on the pictures he supervised — plus enough stock in the company to ensure another $500,000 a year.

The assets Fox brought to the merger consisted mainly of its studio complex and distribution system serving some 500 theaters. In terms of on-screen talent, however, the holdings were far more modest. Foremost among them was Will Rogers, in 1935 probably the most beloved private citizen in America. He made as many as four pictures a year for Fox, and every one was guaranteed money in the bank. A close second was Shirley, also a guaranteed winner. In distant third and fourth were 20-year-old Alice Faye, whose star was fast rising, and Janet Gaynor, her own popularity on the way down. Suddenly, less than three months after the merger, Will Rogers was dead in the wreckage of his friend Wiley Post’s plane up at the north end of Alaska — and Shirley Temple was alone at the top of 20th Century Fox’s star pyramid.

By this time Shirley was selling more than just theater tickets. First came dolls, in baby and little-girl sizes, through an agreement with the Ideal Toy Co. The first model duplicated the red polka dot dress she wore in Stand Up and Cheer!; later editions capitalized on her aviator suit from Bright Eyes and the 19th century togs of The Little Colonel. Within a year other products appeared sporting her image or her name: Everything an American girl could possibly wear — dresses, overcoats, hair ribbons, barrettes, pajamas, hats, berets, pins, anklets, costume jewelry — or use — soap, mugs, plates, pitchers, paper dolls, coloring books, playing cards, scrapbooks, pocket mirrors, notepads, toy sewing machines, candy molds. Then there were the product tie-ins: Quaker Puffed Wheat, Wheaties, flowers by Postal Telegraph, Sperry Drifted Snow Flour, and on and on. To say nothing of the flood of unauthorized products in the U.S., England, Spain, Germany, France — everything from rag dolls and figurines to tiaras, rings and cigar bands. These kept the lawyers at Ideal, Fox and elsewhere busy in a largely fruitless effort to stem the tide of fly-by-night piracy.

Such popularity did have its worrisome side, especially for Shirley’s parents; the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby was still news. Their concern would be borne out during a radio broadcast on Christmas Eve 1939, when a woman in the audience, unhinged by grief, pointed a gun at Shirley, determined to kill the body that she believed had stolen the soul of her own dead daughter; the danger passed when the woman was seized and disarmed by two FBI agents who had been alerted to her suspicious presence. But that’s getting ahead of my story. For now, in 1935, the studio engaged burly John Griffith to serve as Shirley’s chauffeur and bodyguard (Shirley considered him a grown-up playmate). “Watch the kid like a hawk,” Zanuck told Griffith. “If anything happens to her, this studio might as well close up.”

The Littlest Rebel

(released December 19, 1935)

Shirley’s first picture to bear the new 20th Century Fox logo (with its now-famous fanfare) had been in the works before the merger, as the cover of this sheet music suggests. The ostensible source was a play by Edward Peple that ran for 55 performances on Broadway in the winter of 1911-12 before embarking on a long and prosperous tour, making a child star of the ill-fated Mary Miles Minter. The play had been filmed before in 1914, a version now presumed lost. (Playwright Peple, like The Little Colonel author Annie Fellows Johnston, did not live to see Shirley’s remake, having died of a heart attack in 1924, age 54.)

Surprising as it may sound, Edward Peple’s play is still in print. I have a copy on order, but it hadn’t arrived by the time this post was ready to go live. When I’ve had a chance to peruse the script, I’ll have a sense of how closely Edwin J. Burke’s script followed it, and if necessary I’ll post an update here. For the present, all we have is the testimony of Variety’s reviewer that there was “no trace of the Edward Peple play in the Burke film version.”

But actually, that’s a bit of an overstatement. In fact, several of the characters’ names survived from stage to screen. Shirley plays Virginia Cary, a six-year-old resident of her namesake state whose birthday party is interrupted by news of the firing on Fort Sumter. Her father (John Boles) soon rides off to war, leaving the plantation in the hands of his wife (Karen Morley), little Virgie, and their loyal slaves, led by butler Uncle Billy (Bill Robinson) and his assistant James Henry (Willie Best). Late in the war, the Union Army sweeps through, and Virgie’s defiance earns the amused respect of Yankee Col. Morrison (Jack Holt). When Capt. Cary sneaks home to attend his wife’s deathbed and is captured, a sympathetic Morrison tries to help him and Virgie escape through Union lines, but father and daughter are caught and the two men are condemned to the firing squad — Capt. Cary for spying, Col. Morrison for aiding and abetting the enemy. Virgie and Uncle Billy rush to Washington, hoping to obtain a pardon from President Lincoln. I won’t say how this all turns out, but even if I did it would hardly amount to a surprise or a spoiler.

The Littlest Rebel was aimed at duplicating the success of The Little Colonel; in fact, it surpassed it, and was one of Shirley’s smoothest pictures. The only thing that really dates it today — and it dates it terribly — is the racial attitude I mentioned in my notes on The Little Colonel. That attitude is even more glaring and uncomfortable in The Littlest Rebel because the picture deals directly with the Civil War itself. When Edward Peple wrote his play in 1914, the war was well within human memory; even by the time the movie was made, that generation had not yet passed away (three years later, in 1938, the 75th anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg would occasion a reunion of nearly 1,900 Civil War veterans). The Old South with its genteel planter aristocracy and loyal, happy, contented slaves was an article of faith in the Myth of the Lost Cause, one that died hard and bitterly, and it’s on full display in The Littlest Rebel. It’s difficult to argue with modern viewers who find it just too hard to take. (Shirley even plays one scene in blackface disguise, though at least we are spared the sorry spectacle of hearing her speak with a “darkie” accent.)

Modern misgivings about The Littlest Rebel tend to focus on Willie Best as James Henry. Comedian Robert Klein once described Best as “the man who single-handedly set back race relations in this country fifty years.” That was an exaggeration for comic effect and a disservice to Best. Nevertheless, Klein’s joke had a kernel of truth. Willie Best was, essentially, Stepin Fetchit with better diction; like Fetchit (another talented performer, born Lincoln Perry), he adopted a comic persona — shiftless, slack-jawed, none too bright — that played into the hands of racists then and now, only too eager to believe it represented African Americans in general. Both men were unable (or not allowed) to give their characters the kind of dignity that Bill Robinson, Hattie McDaniel, Clarence Muse, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and a very few others were able to project during those years of artistic apartheid.

So: The Littlest Rebel has Willie Best’s James Henry to neutralize (if not nullify) the humanity of Bill Robinson’s Uncle Billy — rather than complement and reinforce it, as Hattie McDaniel’s Mom Beck had done in The Little Colonel. Plus a slave population so happy in bondage that they have no interest in emancipation and don’t even understand what it is. With all that, it’s not surprising that many viewers prefer not to watch the picture today — much less show it to children who can’t place it in its proper historical context.

Still, if you can place it in its context and make the necessary allowances, The Littlest Rebel has its compensations. John Boles and Jack Holt may not quite strike the sparks with Shirley that Lionel Barrymore or Adolphe Menjou did, but they’re personable performers who are at ease with her, and vice versa. Shirley’s own acting instincts are at their best, and her performance shows (paradoxical as it may sound) a sort of sophisticated simplicity. This scene, for example, is extremely well-played. It’s in Uncle Billy’s cabin; Col. Morrison is searching for little Virgie’s father, who’s hidden in a trapdoor in the ceiling. The colonel doggedly questions Virgie, who tries to convince him her father is gone, but she’s not accustomed to lying and becomes rattled under his cross-examination.

This scene of Virgie’s audience with President Lincoln is another highlight. Lincoln is played here by Frank McGlynn Sr., one of Hollywood’s main go-to guys when it came to our 16th president (McGlynn played the role 11 times between 1924 and 1939). Here Virgie and the president discuss her father’s case while sharing slices off an apple.

McGlynn and Shirley had worked together before; in Little Miss Marker he played Doc Chesley, the racetrack vet tending to Marky’s “charger” — the “Kind Keeper”, Marky calls him. (And by the way, another memorable touch in this scene is the moment when Lincoln greets Virgie and Uncle Billy — memorable for the look of surprise and pleasure on Uncle Billy’s face that the President of the United States is shaking his hand.)

Chief among The Littlest Rebel‘s compensations is — do I really need to say it? — Shirley and Bojangles dancing. Like this scene, with Col. Morrison riding up to Uncle Billy’s cabin,where Billy and Virgie try to act carefree and nonchalant,dancing to “The Arkansas Traveler” on the harmonica and banjo to keep the colonel from suspecting that Virgie’s father is hiding in the garret overhead. (UPDATE 8/6/14: Alas,this clip has been removed from YouTube and the associated account closed. The only other clips of this dance are of far inferior quality, but I’ll keep checking.) (UPDATE #2, 8/21/14: This clip is colorized and the focus is too fuzzy, but it will suffice to give a sense of the exuberance of this dance. I’ll keep looking for something better.)

This one, in which Virgie and Uncle Billy become street entertainers in an effort to earn the money for train tickets to Washington to see President Lincoln, may be Shirley and Bojangles’ best-known number (second, perhaps, to the staircase dance from The Little Colonel). Like the staircase dance, it’s “a capella“, so to speak, performed without musical accompaniment except for the sounds they make themselves. The clip, again, is colorized — and this may be a good time to discuss the preponderance of colorized clips among these posts on Shirley. In the 1980s, when colorization had its brief run, nearly all of Shirley’s 1930s pictures were released that way on VHS — no doubt in hopes of appealing to young children, who (then as now) did not share their elders’ admiration for black-and-white photography, nor their dislike for computer-coloring. Even today, on DVD, these movies offer the choice of viewing one way or the other. Anyhow, here are Shirley/Virgie and Bojangles/Uncle Billy in The Littlest Rebel‘s boardwalk dance:

Variety’s reviewer “Land” pegged The Littlest Rebel exactly, noting its striking similarity to The Little Colonel, yet conceding that it probably “won’t dampen the enthusiasm of the Temple worshippers…All bitterness and cruelty has been rigorously cut out and the Civil War emerges as a misunderstanding among kindly gentlemen with eminently happy slaves and a cute little girl who sings and dances through the story…Story is synthetic throughout but smart showmanship instills the illusion of life.” In the New York Times, Andre Sennwald agreed: “You may have got the mistaken notion from ‘So Red the Rose’ [a Civil War melodrama released the month before] that the war between the States was filled with ruin, death, rebellious slaves and horrid Yankee barbarians. ‘The Littlest Rebel’ corrects that unhappy thought and presents the conflict as a decidely chummy little war…As Uncle Billy, the faithful family butler, Bill Robinson is excellent, and some of the best moments in ‘The Littlest Rebel’ are those in which he breaks into song and dance with Mistress Temple.”

For Shirley’s next picture, her first of 1936, it would be back into modern dress, although the story on which it was based had been written even before The Little Colonel:

Captain January

(released April 24, 1936)

Captain January seems to have a special place in the hearts of Baby Boomers of a Certain Age, perhaps because it was one of Shirley Temple’s first features to go into television syndication in the 1950s. The source material was an 1891 novella by Laura E. Richards. Born Laura Elizabeth Howe in 1850, Mrs. Richards was the daughter of Julia Ward Howe, author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”. A prolific author in her own right, Mrs. Richards wrote over 90 books, including, with her sister Maud Howe Elliott, a biography of their mother that won them a Pulitzer Prize in 1917. Mrs. Richards also wrote the children’s nonsense poem “Eletelephony” (“Once there was an elephant,/Who tried to use the telephant –/No! No! I mean an elephone,/Who tried to use the telephone…”). Unlike the authors of The Little Colonel and The Littlest Rebel, she lived long enough to see two movies made from her modest little story, dying in 1943 at 92. Whether she saw either movie, or what she thought of them, is not recorded.

Mrs. Richards’s Captain January is a short-and-bittersweet tale of a retired old seafarer, one Januarius Judkins (“Captain January”), who lives alone tending a lighthouse on a small island off the rugged coast of Maine.

One night during a terrible storm he sees a ship founder in the rocky sea around his island. Venturing out in search of possible survivors, he finds only one, an infant girl clutched in her dead mother’s arms. He retrieves the child and several corpses, including both the baby’s parents. The anonymous dead he gives a decent burial on his island, the orphan girl he takes to shelter in his lighthouse. The next day a trunkfull of clothing belonging to the infant’s mother washes up on shore, but it contains no hint of the dead parents’ identities beyond some embroidered initials. With no way of knowing the baby’s name or family, he raises the girl himself, naming her Star Bright.

Ten years later, a woman on a passing cruise ship catches a glimpse of Star and is convinced she is the daughter of her dead sister, lost at sea with her husband and child while sailing home from Europe ten years earlier. It’s soon established beyond doubt that Star is Isabel Maynard, the long lost and presumed dead niece of that cruise ship passenger, Mrs. Morton. At first, Mrs. Morton wishes to take the girl to live with her, with full gratitude to Captain January for rescuing and raising her. But when she sees how it will break the hearts of both Star and the captain, she relents, and lovingly leaves the girl with the only father she’s ever known.

Even so, Captain January knows that his days on earth are nearly done, and he arranges with his friend, sailor Bob Peet, to keep an eye on the lighthouse whenever he sails by: If the little blue flag is flying, all is well; if the flag has been struck, it’s time for Bob to come and collect Star, and to take her to live with the Mortons, who will welcome her as one of their own — which in fact she is. Finally, in the spring of the following year, January feels his heart failing, and with his last ounce of strength he hauls down the little flag, then returns to his favorite chair to wait. “For Captain January’s last voyage is over, and he is already in the haven where he would be.”

Captain January was first filmed as a 1924 silent with Baby Peggy and Hobart Bosworth as the little orphan and her lighthouse-keeper foster father. For reasons known only to scenarists John Grey and Eve Unsell, this version features a name switch: the orphan girl is nicknamed “Captain January” while her guardian is “Jeremiah Judkins”. Otherwise, the silent version has elements that would survive in Shirley’s remake twelve years later: The busybodies in the nearby village conspiring to wrest the child from her guardian “for her own good”; the ingenious ending that restored the orphan to her family without taking her from her beloved guardian. (By the way, I am delighted to report that as of this writing, Baby Peggy — now known as Diana Serra Cary — is still with us, and if all goes well, will turn 96 next October 26. Continued long life to her.)

For Captain January‘s 1936 incarnation, Sam Hellman and Gladys Lehman, who had written Shirley’s signature role in Little Miss Marker, were engaged to write the script with Harry Tugend. The first thing the three did was to straighten out the names: Shirley plays Star, the orphan of the storm, while veteran character actor Guy Kibbee played the old lighthouse-keeper (the first time somebody besides Shirley played the title role in one of her pictures; it wouldn’t happen again until The Blue Bird in 1940).

The writers also supplemented the contents of that washed-up trunk of Star’s mother’s clothes; there is now enough in the trunk to include a photograph of Star’s mother, and to establish that she was an opera singer who once played Lucia di Lammermoor. This sets up an amusing scene later where Star, Captain January, and January’s friend Captain Nazro (Slim Summerville) sing a burlesque of the famous sextet from Lucia, with the parts reduced to three and Star squeaking that hers is “too high!…Still too high!” The trunk also contains other clues to Star’s identity; the fact that January never followed through on them as thoroughly as he might have, and that Nazro later does, becomes a point of conflict in the movie’s plot.

The village busybodies from the 1924 movie are here reduced to one, but she’s a formidable battleax: Agatha Morgan (Sara Haden), the new local truant officer. Like all busybodies, she delights in overstepping her bounds; not content with making sure Star is enrolled in school, she makes it her personal mission to get the child away from Cap’s “disreputable” custody. When the lighthouse is slated for automation and it looks like Cap will be thrown out of a job, it’s clear to everyone that Mrs. Morgan will be only too eager to pounce. Captain Nazro, fisherman Paul Roberts (Buddy Ebsen), and the sympathetic schoolteacher Mary Marshall (June Lang) take steps they feel are necessary, and the plot accordingly thickens.

Years later, director David Butler reminisced about the shooting of this scene, where Captain Nazro brings a live crane as a birthday present for Star. The crane, Butler recalled, clamped its beak onto Shirley’s nose and refused to let go, even as Shirley’s mother and teacher, the crane’s handler, and sundry crew members fluttered around in varying states of agitation. The story, frankly, has the air of an old-timer’s tall tale, and sure enough, Shirley makes no mention in Child Star of such a thing happening.

She does, however, remember problems with that obstreperous crane. At their first meeting, the bird did peck in her direction, tumbling her backwards in surprise. “They always go for the eyes,” a propman warned. “Keep your distance.” (That makes more sense than latching onto the nose.) All efforts to wrangle the crane were met with attacks — until one of the crew drove flathead nails through the webbing in its feet, anchoring it to the floor. Thus the scene shown here was shot, with the three humans standing well out of reach, then the bird was released, none the worse for the experience. Shirley says Butler swore everybody to secrecy, but word leaked out and late that afternoon a representative from the humane society showed up to investigate. Fortunately for Butler and 20th Century Fox, every time the woman tried to inspect the bird’s feet for telltale perforations, she got pecked at for her trouble, and the whole thing blew over.

The musical highlight of Captain January‘s three songs was Shirley’s song-and-dance duet with gangly, stilt-legged Buddy Ebsen to “At the Codfish Ball” by Lew Pollack and Sidney D. Mitchell. As choreographed by Jack Donohue, it was a long and complex routine that ranged over a long stretch of the Fox backlot, made extra-challenging by the almost comical discrepancy between the length of Shirley’s stride and Buddy’s. “Somehow,” she remembered, “he shortened his stride and I learned to fly.” The focus is a little soft in this YouTube clip, but the number still comes through:

The other songs were an opening number, “Early Bird” (Also by Pollack and Mitchell), which had Star popping out of bed in the morning and breaking the fourth wall, singing directly to the camera (and hence the audience) as she gets dressed.

Then there was this rather odd little number. The song was “The Right Somebody to Love” by Pollack and Jack Yellen. It was one of those wistful little ballads like “Where Is Love?” from Oliver! — the kind of song that can be sung child-to-parent, parent-to-child, or sweetheart-to-sweetheart. In this case, Star sings it to Cap, followed by this fantasy sequence where their roles are reversed, and Cap is the baby being tended by nurse Star. It was filmed on a giant-size set designed to make Kibbee look like an infant — which meant that Shirley, in turn, looked positively Lilliputian.

Both Abel Green in Variety and Frank S. Nugent in the New York Times found Captain January to be “okay film fare” (Green) despite the “moss-covered script” (Nugent). One of the most interesting reviews came from across the Pond, where Graham Greene, writing in the London Spectator, found the picture to be “a little depraved, with an appeal interestingly decadent…Shirley Temple acts and dances with immense vigor and assurance, but some of her popularity seems to rest on a coquetry quite as mature as Miss [Claudette] Colbert’s, and on an oddly precocious body, as voluptuous in grey flannel trousers as Miss [Marlene] Dietrich’s.” Greene would pursue that line of thought in subsequent reviews, and would in time catch the gimlet eye of 20th Century Fox’s legal department. But I’ll get to that in its turn.

For the record, just in case you’ve lost track, Shirley was now seven years old; her eighth birthday was the day before Captain January opened in New York. Of course, hardly anybody besides her parents knew that; the rest of the world — including Shirley herself — thought she had just turned seven.

Next time: Fox’s top two female stars go head-to-head.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 6

Posted on June 1, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 13, 2023

Our Little Girl

(released June 6, 1935)

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on Shirley’s next picture because…Well, if (as I said in Part 3) Now and Forever is a bit of a dud, Our Little Girl is a flat-out stinker. A country doctor (Joel McCrea) gets so wrapped up in his practice and his research that his wife (Rosemary Ames), feeling ignored, seeks comfort first in the company, then in the arms, of their bachelor neighbor (Lyle Talbot). Meanwhile, the doctor’s nurse (Erin O’Brien-Moore) nurses an unrequited love for him. Caught in the middle of all this, and neglected by both her parents, is the couple’s daughter (Shirley).

Shirley couldn’t save this one; nothing could. The script by Steven Avery and Allen Rivkin was an indigestible stew of sugar, soap and corn, and director John Robertson (a veteran whose credits went back to 1916) was utterly defeated by it. On the other hand, even a brilliant script couldn’t have survived Robertson’s leaden, clomping direction, which made the picture feel much longer than the 64 minutes it actually ran. Perhaps not incidentally, this was Robertson’s last movie, as it was for leading lady Rosemary Ames, whose two-year, eight-picture career ended here.

Shirley never made a worse movie, and neither did Joel McCrea. (Lyle Talbot did — but only because he made three pictures with Ed Wood.)

Variety’s reviewer “Odec” predicted (accurately) that “despite [the] story”, Shirley’s fans would make the picture profitable. At the New York Times, Andre Sennwald was less conciliatory: “As we have learned to expect, ‘Pollyanna’ and ‘The Bobsey Twins’ [sic] are classics of gutter realism by comparison with the sentimental syrups which Miss Temple’s impresarios arrange for the Baby Duse.“ Dyspeptic, yes, but Our Little Girl had it coming, and worse. (Mr. Sennwald still spoke fondly of Little Miss Marker, but he was clearly reaching a saturation point, if not with Shirley, at least with her vehicles. As fate would have it, he would review only two more of them — Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel, with increasing asperity — before dying in a gas-line explosion in his Manhattan penthouse on January 12, 1936; Sennwald was only 28.)

In Child Star, Shirley said of Our Little Girl, “I forgot it as soon as possible.” As well she might, but it wasn’t because of the picture itself; it was due to things that happened during shooting.

First: Shirley was going through the normal tooth losses of any kid her age, but shooting couldn’t be held up while they grew back, so she wore temporaries for the camera. One day on Our Little Girl‘s rural location, she sneezed two of hers out into a grassy meadow. The whole crew searched long through the grass, but to no avail, and the company had to wrap for the day while new ones were crafted for the little star. Shirley had conceived a girlish crush on Joel McCrea, and seeing his annoyance at the delay, she was accordingly chagrined.

But worse was to come; the very next day, Shirley’s chagrin turned to mortification. Standing with McCrea by a stream while lighting gaffers fiddled endlessly with their lights and reflectors, and with the long silence broken only by the trickle of the nearby brook, Shirley — there’s no gentle way to say it — wet her pants. Understandably, she immediately burst into tears. Mother Gertrude gently led her sobbing daughter to their trailer, where socks and undies were replaced, then Mother bucked up Shirley’s courage for the unavoidable return to the set. “Finally I mustered enough confidence to open the door,” Shirley wrote, “but only by convincing myself the whole thing had never happened.” She considered that moment her “Oscar performance”.

Poor Shirley. Even fifty-plus years on, writing in Child Star, her humiliation is still palpable. No wonder she forgot Our Little Girl without delay. We should too.

Curly Top

(released August 1, 1935)

Now this was more like it. Curly Top may not be Shirley’s best movie, exactly — there are several pictures ahead of it in that queue — but it just might be her most typical. And as a showcase for the full range of her talent it has few equals. The late film encyclopedist Leslie Halliwell cited it as an example of Shirley at her personal best, when he placed her in his fanciful Halliwell’s Hall of Fame (“for captivating the mass world audience and enabling it to forget the depression”).

Shirley plays Elizabeth “Curly” Blair, an orphan who charms Edward Morgan (John Boles), one of the rich trustees of the orphanage where she lives; Morgan legally adopts Curly while pretending to be acting on behalf of one “Hiram Jones.”

The story was a liberal reworking of Jean Webster’s 1912 novel Daddy Long Legs, which told of Judy Abbott, an orphan who, when she grows too old to stay at her orphanage, is sponsored through college by a benefactor who insists on remaining anonymous. By story’s end Judy learns that the mysterious “John Smith” is wealthy Jervis Pendleton, whom she knew (and had a girl’s crush on) from his visits to the orphanage. Now full-grown (and college educated), Judy marries him. Webster’s novel had already been filmed in 1919 with Mary Pickford and in 1931 with Janet Gaynor (and would be again in 1955, as a musical starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron). Since Fox had produced the 1931 version and still owned the screen rights to the story, they were at liberty to refashion it to fit Shirley.

Needless to say, if the boys at Fox couldn’t wait for Shirley’s adult teeth to grow in, they certainly couldn’t sit around while she reached an age to marry John Boles, so Patterson McNutt and Arthur Beckhard’s script supplied Curly with an older sister Mary (Rochelle Hudson) to be adopted with her and to discharge the romantic duties with the handsome Boles. Hudson and Boles even held up their end with the songs: Hudson, a neophyte singer, did quite well with “The Simple Things in Life” (by Edward Heyman and Ray Henderson), while Boles returned to his musical comedy roots with “It’s All So New to Me” (also by Heyman and Henderson) and the picture’s title song (Henderson and Ted Koehler).

But like the story, the supporting players (Boles; Hudson; Jane Darwell and Rafaela Ottiano as matrons at the orphanage; Esther Dale as Boles’s aunt; Billy Gilbert and Arthur Treacher as his cook and butler) were all beside the point. Shirley was just about the whole show. She is even the focus of both Boles’s songs. After singing “It’s All So New to Me”, while the orchestra wafts on in the background, he strolls around his palatial drawing room, where he fancies Shirley beaming down at him from the paintings on the walls…

,,,Then there’s the title tune, “Curly Top”. First Morgan sings it to and about Curly, then for the second chorus she does a tapdance on top of his piano (he’s rich, he can afford it). Curly Top also has what became, for Shirley, a signature song second only to “On the Good Ship Lollipop”:”Animal Crackers in My Soup” (by Ted Koehler and Irving Caesar). The song is a real charmer, but I’m not posting a YouTube clip of it for the same reason I didn’t for “Lollipop”: surely just about everybody knows it.

But they may not know this one (once again, colorized). It comes later in the picture, when Curly, who hasn’t forgotten her and Mary’s friends back at the orphanage, persuades Morgan to stage a charity show to benefit her former home. In it, she performs “When I Grow Up” (Heyman, Henderson), in which she sings of what her life to come will be like. Shirley’s mishap by the brook on the set of Our Little Girl reminds us — as it no doubt did her co-workers — that this showbiz phenomenon was really just a little girl after all. Conversely, “When I Grow Up” reminds us that this little girl was a genuine, honest-to-God phenomenon. I mean, how many kindergarteners would you ask to imagine themselves at 16, 21 and 75? Well, they asked it of Shirley, and she delivered a virtual one-girl production number. [UPDATE 8/13/23: The YouTube link originally embedded in this post has been removed because “the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated”…

…However, the video still exists on YouTube. Since I am no longer able to embed YouTube videos in my posts — I still don’t know why, and I suppose I never will — I’m linking to it instead. You can see Shirley’s tour de force of acting, singing and dancing — while jumping rope, no less — here.]

Variety’s Abel Green pegged Curly Top as “cinch b.o. for almost any house”, and, as usual, he was absolutely right. And even the Times’s Andre Sennwald found the picture (at least while Shirley was on) “completely bearable”: “Her remarkable sense of timing has never been revealed more plainly than in the song and dance scenes in her new film, and she plays her straightforward dramatic scenes with the assurance and precision of a veteran actress. With all this, she has lost none of her native freshness and charm.”

Curly Top was Shirley’s last picture for Fox Film Corp., and her last with Winfield Sheehan, who had piloted her career since Stand Up and Cheer! As chief of production in the wake of William Fox’s personal and professional nosedive in 1929-30, Sheehan had managed to stave off the studio’s total financial collapse (largely through hanging on to Will Rogers and locking Shirley into a long-term contract), but the waters were still rocky. Even before Curly Top went into production, there were rumors of negotiations with the upstart Twentieth Century Pictures, a thriving new kid in town, but one in need of a studio complex and distribution system — one like Fox’s, for example. On May 29, 1935, a merger was announced; the new studio would be called 20th Century Fox. Less than two months later, Winfield Sheehan was out as head of production, replaced by the man who had spearheaded Twentieth Century to a success that entitled it to be senior partner in its merger with the more venerable Fox. The man, moreover, who would be in charge of Shirley’s career for the rest of the 1930s: Darryl F. Zanuck.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 5

Posted on May 29, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 30, 2016

The Little Colonel

(released March 21, 1935)

LC-poster02bW Shirley’s first picture of 1935 was a period piece, her first costume drama as a star. The source material was a children’s book by Annie Fellows Johnston of McCutchanville, Indiana. Mrs. Johnston turned to writing at the age of 29 when her husband died in 1892, leaving her with three small stepchildren to raise on her own. The Little Colonel, published in 1895, was her third novel, and it proved so popular that she wrote a sequel a year until 1907. She wrote, in all, some four dozen books before she died in 1931 at age 68, but The Little Colonel was the only one that was ever filmed. It’s a pity Mrs. Johnston couldn’t have hung on for four more years and seen the apotheosis of her most famous creation.

Anyone who thinks that a movie is never as good as the book should try reading The Little Colonel. Mrs. Johnston’s ever-so-precious style hasn’t weathered the years well; I suspect it hadn’t by 1935, either. (It’s available online here if you want to check it out.) The story, as the saying goes, had “good bones”, and writer William Conselman fleshed them out rather better than Mrs. Johnston had. (Conselman also wrote Bright Eyes and would write for Shirley again.)

In Conselman’s script (unlike the original book), the story opens before the birth of its title character. A title tells us it’s “Kentucky in the ’70s”, and we meet old Colonel Lloyd (Lionel Barrymore), an unreconstructed Confederate for whom the War isn’t over. At a soiree at his plantation he offers a toast: “Gentlemen, I give you the South — and confusion to her enemies!” But it’s the Colonel who’s due for confusion; one of those “enemies”, a Northerner — named Sherman, no less — has won the heart of his beloved daughter Elizabeth (Evelyn Venable). The Colonel interrupts her and her intended (John Lodge) in the act of eloping, and he warns her: “Elizabeth, when that door closes, it’ll never open for you again.” Elizabeth leaves without another word, and she doesn’t close the door — she slams it.

Next scene, it’s six years later and the Shermans — Jack, Elizabeth and their daughter Lloyd (Shirley) — are at a military outpost on the edge of the western frontier. Lloyd has become the darling of the post, and she receives a commission as honorary colonel — an addition by Conselman that makes the girl a “little colonel” in fact, not just as the nickname the author gives her in the original story. The family has sold everything they own and left their Philadelphia home. Papa Jack is to continue west to make a new home for them; when he’s well-established and it’s safe, he’ll send for his wife and daughter. Until then, Elizabeth and the Little Colonel will return to Kentucky and live in a small cottage on the family property that was left to her by her mother.

When the Old Colonel learns there are new tenants in the Cottage, he drops by to welcome them. But when the door is answered by his daughter Elizabeth, he storms off in a rage. “You’re a bad man to make my mother cry,” little Lloyd tells the old man’s portrait in the Cottage parlor. Later, when the two Colonels — Old and Little — finally meet, he doesn’t realize who the girl is, and he berates her for dirtying her dress making mudpies. Whoever your mother is, he tells her, she should teach you better. The Little Colonel stamps her foot — “Don’t you dare say anything about my mother!” — and hurls a fistful of mud at his white suit.

Later, when the old man learns who she is, he is mollified, even apologetic. He may have disowned his daughter and her husband, but he sees no reason not to associate with his granddaughter — especially since she reminds him so much of himself (and his outcast daughter, though he won’t admit it).

When Lloyd’s Papa Jack staggers home, sick with fever after having been swindled of the family’s savings by two hucksters (Sidney Blackmer, Alden Chase), Lloyd is sent to live with her grandfather to avoid catching what has laid her papa low. In time, just as we expect, the Little Colonel will effect a family reconciliation. But in the meantime she and her grandfather will just about drive each other to distraction, they’re both so willful, stubborn and short-tempered.

It’s easy to imagine that the Old Colonel’s consternation at the little girl’s spunk in standing up to him was a reflection of Lionel Barrymore’s own response to his little co-star; there’s a befuddled mix of exasperation and amusement that seems to come from both character and actor. Like the people they play, Barrymore and Shirley’s working relationship got off to a tetchy start: At their first rehearsal, when Barrymore stammered and groped for his lines, Shirley (who, being still too young to read, had memorized the whole script) prompted him. This sent the veteran actor storming off to his dressing room, where he sat sulking (and probably drinking) and threatening to walk off the picture.

Shirley describes in Child Star how both director David Butler and her own mother gently but firmly prodded her to make peace: you brought this on, they said, you have to make it right. And she did. She says she managed it by going to his dressing room, addressing him as “Uncle Lionel”, and asking for his autograph (“To my favorite little niece,” he wrote, “Your Uncle Lionel.”) It’s hard to believe it was a simple as that, for the seasoned old trouper to be coaxed out of his pout by the toddler who caused it, but that’s what Shirley says (oh to have been a fly on that wall!). Anyhow, Barrymore didn’t walk, and The Little Colonel crackles when he and Shirley are on screen together.

There’s another teaming in The Little Colonel that also makes it crackle. Playing the Old Colonel’s butler Walker was Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Robinson began in vaudeville in 1900, and by 1934, when The Little Colonel was made, he was universally recognized (and for that matter, still is) as one of the greatest tapdancers who ever lived. Shirley was always proud that she and Robinson were the first interracial dance team in movie history. More than that, because of the age difference between six-year-old Shirley and the 56-year-old Robinson (and at the time, let’s face it, because of the difference in the color of their skin), they were one male-and-female team whose dances carried no hint of courtship or romance — nothing but the sheer joy of dancing together. (“The smile on my face wasn’t acting,” Shirley said in Child Star; “I was ecstatic.”) The teaming was Winfield Sheehan’s idea, and he hesitated only because he was unsure if Robinson could act; his three previous screen appearances had been dance-only. Robinson passed a screen test, and that was that. In all, he and Shirley would make five pictures together (I’ll get to the others in their time), and it all started here.

Their first dance together was the famous staircase dance. It was Robinson’s signature act, and he modified it to accomodate Shirley’s abilities; she couldn’t have come up to his level in the rehearsal time they had — but then, probably nobody could, no matter how long they rehearsed. Shirley remembered her “Uncle Billy” as “a superlative teacher, imperturbable and kind, but demanding…Every one of my taps had to ring crisp and clear in the best cadence. Otherwise I had to do it over.”

It’s been a while since I posted a YouTube clip of Shirley, and this is a good time to resume. Not the staircase dance, though. As good as it is, you don’t see as much of their body language, especially their faces beaming in the pleasure of each other’s company, as you do in this one, which comes later, with Walker and little Lloyd cavorting in the stables, to the accompaniment of “Oh! Susanna” on the harmonica:

It must be said that racial attitudes of the 1930s make The Little Colonel (and The Littlest Rebel, later in ’35) an awkward experience for some people today. It’s hard not to view these movies through the hindsight of how far African Americans have come (on screen and in real life) in the last 80 years. It’s worth remembering, though, the progress they had made by 1935 — what little there was, and only on screen at that — in the 40 years since The Little Colonel was written (or even the 20 years since The Birth of a Nation). We rightly cringe now when Colonel Lloyd calls to his granddaughter’s black playmates, “Come on, you pickaninnies!” But in Annie Fellows Johnston’s novel he uses an even uglier word — and for that matter, so does the Little Colonel herself. And to be fair to The Little Colonel (the movie), there’s a scene where Lloyd attends a black church’s baptism ceremony in a stream that runs through her grandfather’s property; the scene is presented unpatronizingly and without condescension. Also, the two most prominent black characters are played by Robinson as Walker and, as the Little Colonel’s cook and housekeeper “Mom Beck”, Hattie McDaniel (five years before she became the first African American to win an Academy Award). Both of them imbue their characters with a warmth and dignity that rises above the racism of the time.

Plus, of course and always, there’s the sheer pleasure of Shirley and Bojangles dancing.

Apropos of nothing, and apparently just because the powers that be at Fox felt like it, The Little Colonel ends — after Papa Jack has gotten well, his fortunes have been restored, the swindlers brought to justice, and Colonel Lloyd reconciled to his daughter and son-in-law — in Technicolor. The rationale is young Lloyd’s penchant for casting her stories in colors: “Tell me a blue story”; “This is a yellow story”. Evidently, she asks her grandfather for “a pink party” (the surviving version isn’t clear; something seems missing), and he replies, “Yes, just as pink as those flowers,” as a vase of black-and-white roses change to pink-and-green. I leave The Little Colonel with a shot from this party scene because it’s Shirley’s first appearance in the newly-perfected Technicolor process — and her last for several years.

To be continued…

CMBA Blogathon: Come Next Spring (1956)

Posted on May 23, 2014 by Jim LaneFebruary 16, 2023

I interrupt my look back at Shirley Temple’s career to offer Cinedrome’s contribution to the Classic Movie Blog Association‘s blogathon Fabulous Films of the 1950s. Go here for a complete list of entries; you’ll find my colleagues holding forth on an impressive array of movies legendary and obscure, long-remembered and half-forgotten.

The ’50s, like the ’40s before (subject of another CMBA blogathon here), were an embarrassment-of-riches period. The Hollywood studio system was dying, it’s true, but that wasn’t so clear at the time; in the second half of the decade especially, the studios seemed to be recovering from the sucker punch of television. There were plenty of terrific movies, three of which are illustrated on the banner here. For Cinedrome’s entry, I’ve decided to follow my customary practice and choose a lesser-known title — one that deserves to be remembered and rediscovered:

*** * ***

In the mid-1950s Republic Pictures was on its last legs as a movie-producing entity. Formed in 1935, it was the brainchild of Herbert J. Yates, founder and president of Consolidated Film Industries, a film processing lab based in New York. Yates saw his big chance when six of Hollywood’s Poverty Row studios — the largest (relatively speaking) being Monogram and Mascot — became deeply indebted to Consolidated for processing fees. Yates called all their debts, then offered an alternative: merge into one production facility, with Yates as head of the studio. The others went for it, and Republic Pictures was born. (In 1937, unable to get along with Yates, Monogram’s officers backed out of the deal and reorganized under their old corporate name, which morphed in 1947 into Allied Artists.)

Strictly speaking, Republic was a notch or two above Poverty Row, but it was never a major operation. Its bread and butter was chapter serials and westerns, its biggest stars John Wayne, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers and Rex Allen (in just about that order). There was the occasional prestige picture (again, relatively speaking), like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Red Pony (both 1949), or, a few more notches up the scale, John Ford’s Rio Grande (’50) and The Quiet Man (’52), but for the most part it was cliffhangers, horse operas and hillbilly comedies for the small-town venues. In the summer of 1955, taking one last shot at prestige, Yates dispatched a unit headlined by Ann Sheridan and Steve Cochran up north to the California Gold Country town of Ione (pronounced “eye-own”) in the hills of Amador County 35 miles southeast of Sacramento. There they made what is surely (with the arguable exception of Orson Welles’s 1948 Macbeth) the best movie ever to come out of Republic Pictures that didn’t involve John Ford or John Wayne. (And no, I’m not forgetting Johnny Guitar.)

Come Next Spring was directed by R.G. (“Bud”) Springsteen. Springsteen was the epitome of the reliable but unexceptional studio workhorse. Actually, “plowhorse” would be more like it; his first directing credit came in 1945, and by the time of Come Next Spring ten years later he had already directed over 50 features — mostly Republic program westerns running about an hour, with a smattering of crime dramas and shoestring musical comedies. At the very least, Springsteen was a man who didn’t waste time, film or money — a triple virtue guaranteed to endear him to the penny-pinching Herbert Yates. It would also earn him a secure niche in television; by the time he retired in 1970 he had a hefty resume consisting of multiple episodes of Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Wagon Train, Bonanza, Gentle Ben and others.

The secret ingredient of Come Next Spring was its writer, Montgomery Pittman (shown here in a small role on TV’s Cheyenne, in an episode he also wrote). Pittman was the kind of talent who might almost be described as “unjustly forgotten today” — except that the sorry truth is he died before even being noticed, succumbing to throat cancer at 42 in 1962. He was prolific, resourceful and original, and what he did accomplish in his brief 11-year career gives a frustrating hint of what might have been if even another ten or 15 years had been granted to him.

Born in Oklahoma in 1920, Pittman left home while still a teenager and, according to his own colorful account, found work with a traveling carnival as (no joke!) a snake-oil salesman. After military service during World War II he landed first in New York, then Los Angeles, with hopes of becoming an actor. Among the odd jobs he took during this time was housecleaning for fellow actor Steve Cochran, then under contract to Sam Goldwyn and beginning to make a name for himself; their friendship would bear fruit with Come Next Spring.

After a few minor movie roles (including one in Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison with his friend and sometimes employer Cochran), Pittman transitioned into writing and eventually, like other writers before him, into directing as a means of protecting his scripts. Along the way, in 1952, he met and married Maurita Gilbert Jackson, a widow whose ten-year-old daughter Sherry was already launched on a career as a child actress. Pittman’s relationship with his new stepdaughter would also bear fruit in Come Next Spring.

In the mid-to-late-’50s Pittman was a contract writer for Warner Bros. Television, where he contributed scripts to the studio’s westerns Cheyenne, Sugarfoot and Maverick, and the private-eye series 77 Sunset Strip (for the latter three he usually directed his scripts as well).

In the early ’60s (and, in fact, just as his time among us was running out) Pittman wrote and directed three episodes for Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone on CBS. These jobs are worth mentioning here for several reasons. For one thing, Pittman was the only person during the entire five-year run of the show who both wrote and directed an episode, and he did it three times. For another, those three are among the very best episodes that weren’t written by The Twilight Zone‘s “Big Three” (Serling, Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson). Finally, and most pertinent to the subject at hand, two of those three contain clear echoes of Come Next Spring: (1) “The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank” — about a young man who springs to life out of the coffin at his own funeral, causing his backwoods neighbors to suspect he ain’t exactly human — takes place in the same time and region as Come Next Spring, and it even features several of the same actors (James Best, Edgar Buchanan, and Pittman’s stepdaughter Sherry Jackson); and (2) “The Grave”, in which bounty hunter Lee Marvin accepts a dare to visit the grave of the outlaw he’s been chasing, not only features James Best again, but it has a female character named Ione — an unmistakable hat-tip to the town where Come Next Spring was filmed.

Come Next Spring takes place in 1927 in the hills of Arkansas. We first meet Matt Ballot (Steve Cochran) walking along a country road on a hot summer day. He strikes up a conversation with a little boy he meets (Richard Eyer), and offers to walk along with him a spell, since they both seem to be headed the same way. It turns out that they’re not only headed the same way, they’re headed to the same place. For the boy, Abraham, it’s the farm where he lives. For Matt it’s where he used to live, before he ran out on his wife Bess and daughter Annie nine years ago. Abraham is the son Matt never knew he had.

Bess (Ann Sheridan) is astonished to see Matt again after all these years, and she makes it plain that the surprise is not a pleasant one. “Why are you here, Matt?” she asks coldly.

Matt tells her he’s been all over the country, and found that whisky tastes pretty much the same everywhere. The last three years he’s been wondering what his wife and daughter were doing, “and I guess I just talked myself into” coming to find out. You never answered my letters, he says; didn’t you get them?

She may have gotten them, but clearly she didn’t read them. I never wanted to see you again, she says; I see no reason to change my mind now. Chastened, Matt is turning to leave when Bess suddenly relents. “I still think you done wrong in comin’ back,” she says, “but the damage is done now. Bein’ as you’re here, I reckon it’s only fair for you to see Annie. So you can stay to supper. If you stay sober.”

Matt assures her that he’s been sober for three years, then he asks about Annie. “Is she…Did she ever get over…?” “Nope,” says Bess, “still mute. Cain’t utter a sound.”

When Abraham returns from washing up, ready to do the milking, Bess hesitates barely a second before telling him who Matt is. “Gee,” says Abraham, “I didn’t even know I had a papa.” Later, when Annie (Sherry Jackson) comes home and warily eyes the stranger in their barn pulling a tick from the cat’s tail, Abraham shares the information, with the pride of a little brother who knows something his big sister doesn’t: “Annie, this here’s our papa!”

That night, Abraham surprises Bess by showing up for supper in his Sunday best: suit, bow tie. Later, as Matt prepares to leave, Bess unbends a little more. It’s a long walk in the dark, she says; Matt can spend the night in Abraham’s room. Even Annie, still shy of this stranger in the house, nods that it’s all right with her.

The next morning Abraham comes to breakfast having for the first time slept through the night without suffering from his “problem” — bedwetting. Even Annie is sorry to see Matt leave. So Bess softens an inch or two more. “I forgot how important a man is to children,” she says — and besides, she could use a hand around the farm. So she offers Matt the job. But that’s all he’ll be — a hired hand, at a dollar a day plus his keep, bunking with Abraham. “All right, Bess,” Matt says, “you hired yourself a hand.”

Matt’s return is greeted by others in the community with little enthusiasm; most of them will offer him no more than a frosty hello — and that only after he’s greeted them first, with their own “hello” signaling an end to the conversation. One of the few who greets him kindly is old Jeff Storys (Walter Brennan), a sharecropper on Bess’s farm who knows nothing of her and Matt’s history. Another, who does know but likes Matt anyway, is the Ballots’ friend and neighbor Mr. Canary (Edgar Buchanan), who urges Matt to have patience: “Look at it like you was one o’ them, Matt, put yourself in their place. What would you a-been thinkin’ the night Abraham was born?” Matt wonders if Canary feels the way they do. “I’ve always felt,” Canary tells him, “that you was a lot more of a man than they gave you credit for. If you’re still around here come next spring, you’ll prove I’m right.”

(This isn’t the first time the movie’s title pops up in the dialogue; the phrase seems part of the local idiom. At one point Abraham asks his mother, “How come people are always sayin’ ‘come next spring’ somethin’s gonna happen?” “Oh, it’s just a saying,” she tells him, “meaning ‘in the springtime’ or ‘not too far away’.” Abraham shrugs. “Seems to me it means it ain’t never gonna get done.”)

One who has particular and personal reasons for disgust at Matt’s return is Leroy Hightower (Sonny Tufts), Canary’s hired hand, who has been futilely trying to court Bess almost since the day Matt walked out on her. Leroy’s not a bad sort at heart, but there’s more than a little of the bully about him, and he talks to (and about) Matt with the snide sarcasm of a frustrated suitor. Leroy believes it’s only a matter of time before Matt falls off the wagon and becomes the same good-for-nothing drunk he was nine years ago — and Leroy’s not above doing his bit to make sure it happens.

Bowen Charles Tufts III is one of Hollywood’s sad cases. He was not without talent, but not talented enough to overcome some unfortunate life and career choices. Born of a prominent Boston family (his great-uncle founded Tufts University), he shunned the family banking business to study opera at Yale. Thanks to his good looks and a college football injury that made him 4-F during World War II, he found stardom in Hollywood when handsome leading men were relatively scarce. Alcohol was his undoing, and his off-screen behavior became notorious. He gave probably his best performance in Come Next Spring, and a few years later he reportedly sobered up in hopes of landing the role of Jim Bowie in John Wayne’s The Alamo. Whether that’s true or not, by that time his name was already a Hollywood punchline, and the idea was probably a non-starter. He died of pneumonia in 1970, age 58.

How Matt Ballot, heeding Mr. Canary’s advice about patience, slowly wins his way back into the love of his family and the respect of his neighbors forms the spine of Come Next Spring. The movie’s emotional centerpiece comes almost exactly halfway through its 93 minutes, when Matt, prompted by a question from Abraham, and knowing the question will never go away, finally explains to Annie why she is unable to talk. “It wasn’t no Act of God like you always been told,” he says to her. “God give you a voice just like everybody else.” Bess tries to stop Matt — by this time even she doesn’t want to see him torn down in the children’s eyes — but Matt forges on. What happened, he tells Annie, was that one night, too drunk to drive and too belligerent to let Bess take the wheel, he drove their car off the road and wrecked it. Bess and Matt walked away unhurt, but the traumatic shock left Annie unable to speak — or to make any sound at all — from that day to this.

There are still crises to come for Matt, Bess and the children — a cyclone that devastates their farm, a long-simmering showdown with Leroy, a frightening disappearance by one of the kids — but how it all plays out is something best discovered by seeing the movie itself.

When she made Come Next Spring, Ann Sheridan was 40, several years past her glamour days as Warner Bros.’ “Oomph Girl” (a nickname she loathed). Even at the height of her career at Warners, her talent never got the respect it deserved — not surprising for a studio dominated by its male stars that already had Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland. But she was an actress of considerable — even remarkable — depth and range. She demonstrated this to anyone who cared to notice during the fall of 1941, when she was shooting two pictures simultaneously: She worked mornings on the raucous farce The Man Who Came to Dinner (and was one of the funniest things in it), then after lunch she reported to the set of the brooding, dark melodrama Kings Row. All through World War II she was well-liked by co-workers, popular with audiences, and underrated by critics. That combination held all the way through her untimely death at 51 in 1967 (and the “underrated” part has stayed with her ever since).

Sheridan’s Bess Ballot is a woman who has had self-sufficiency thrust upon her by the only man she’s ever loved, and the experience has made her stern almost to the point of harshness. When Matt’s wandering brings him back into her life, her defenses instantly fly up — because the sight of him, in spite of everything, still makes her weak in the knees. We can see it, even if she can’t, in the way she softens every time Matt is on the verge of leaving again: First she says he can stay for supper, then till morning, then till “come next spring” as a hired hand. This always-underrated actress was never better than she was as the resolute, wounded Bess.

Steve Cochran, unlike Sheridan, was never underrated — exactly. But ever since his sudden death from a lung infection at 48 in 1965, the question has haunted movie buffs: Why didn’t this guy ever become a bigger star? Part of it may have been his tabloid lifestyle of womanizing, carousing and boozing, flying in the face of his fragile health (he had a heart murmur that kept him out of the service during World War II). Or it may have been because he never managed to break the mold of gangsters, thugs and unsavories into which he had been typecast, certainly not the way other actors — Robert Mitchum and Dana Andrews, for instance — had been able to do. Still, he never really gave a bad performance even in the most ill-chosen of his 39 pictures; he was clearly an actor of substance (on stage he had played Orsino in Twelfth Night, Horatio in Hamlet, even Richard III). In Matt Ballot, Cochran gives us a good man who has been beaten down by an ill-spent life and the consequences of his own bad decisions, and who now hopes only to pull himself together before it’s too late. It was the role, and the performance, of Cochran’s life, and he knew it. When Monty Pittman brought him the script, Cochran bought it for his own company, Robert Alexander Productions (named for his real first and middle names), then sold it to Republic on the condition that he and Sherry Jackson play the roles that had been written for them. If Cochran had given this performance for any studio but Republic it might have made all the difference in the arc of his career. But the truth is that probably no other studio would have cast him as anything but a ne’er-do-well or a hood — Matt Ballot, if you will, unrepentant and unreformed. It may even be that no other studio would have touched Come Next Spring at all. That, sad to say, was just Steve Cochran’s luck.

As if Ann Sheridan, and Steve Cochran, and Montgomery Pittman’s intelligent and perceptive script were not enough, there’s another excellent reason to see Come Next Spring, one that all by itself would be more than enough: the extraordinary performance of 13-year-old Sherry Jackson. If Pittman’s script was intended as a showcase for his friend Cochran, it seems to have been equally intended to give Pittman’s own stepdaughter the role of a lifetime. Even by the time Pittman married her mother in 1952, Sherry was already a veteran of more than 15 feature films. Mostly uncredited bits, but more substantial roles were ahead: one of the visionary Portuguese children in The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima (’52), John Wayne’s daughter in Trouble Along the Way (’53). When shooting started on Come Next Spring, Sherry was coming off her second season as Danny Thomas’s oldest daughter on Make Room for Daddy.

As the shy and withdrawn Annie — “around the animals so much,” her mother says, “she’s beginning to act like one” — Sherry Jackson is thoughtful, watchful and wary. With her enormous — and enormously expressive — eyes, and with every tiny movement of the corners of her mouth, she makes Annie’s every fleeting thought as plain as if she spoke them out loud. And she does it without making a sound. Jane Wyman in Johnny Belinda won an Oscar (and rightly so) for doing not much more than Sherry Jackson does in Come Next Spring. It is, without question, one of the greatest child performances ever put on film.

Ann Sheridan, Steve Cochran, Sonny Tufts, Sherry Jackson. All of them were never better — maybe even never as good — as they were in Come Next Spring. Hmmm. Maybe this Bud Springsteen was a better director than he ever got credit for.

*** * ***

When it played host to the Come Next Spring company in 1955, Ione, Calif. was a small foothill community of perhaps 1,500 people. It’s grown somewhat in the 59 years since then, but not as much as you might think. The population now hovers around 4,200 (not counting the nearby Mule Creek State Prison, whose 3,000 inmates are technically “residents” of Ione). The town itself has changed even less than the population. Even allowing for its being dressed to resemble Arkansas 30 years earlier — with its fleet of Model A and Model T Fords, the vehicles of choice for small farmers in the 1920s — the Ione of Come Next Spring is still visible in the Ione of 2014. (NOTE: I am indebted to City Clerk Janice Traverso and her co-workers in the Ione City Hall, and to local resident Doug Hawkins, who played a small role in the picture at the age of 11, for their assistance in finding and photographing locations for Come Next Spring.)

ione-then-now01a

This is Main Street of (the fictitious) Cushin, Arkansas as the Ballot family drives into town on Saturday to do their weekly shopping. That’s them on the right in their Model T — Matt driving, with Annie (holding her hat) and Bess in the back seat. That imposing-looking two-story building is actually the meeting hall of Ione Parlor 33 of the Native Sons of the Golden West…

…and it’s still there today, not much changed except for the removal of that out-of-control ivy on the eastern wall.

One block west and on the other side of Main Street, this building…

…has had a facelift since 1955 — probably more than one, as a matter of fact — but it’s still recognizable. Pretty much.

On the other hand, this stretch of sidewalk where a group of boys (including Doug Hawkins’s classmate Guy Campbell, a local boy who still lives in Ione) are taunting Annie as the town “dummy”…

…well, that’s hardly changed at all.

Here are Jeff Storys and Matt standing outside the town’s picture show chewing the fat (presumably the Ione Theatre’s display cases have been changed to reflect what might have been “now showing” and “coming next week” in 1927). Doug Hawkins remembers seeing Come Next Spring in this theater. That was no doubt a sneak preview for citizens of the host town; the picture’s world premiere was held at the Amador Theatre in nearby Jackson, the Amador County seat (and mighty big news that was in Jackson, believe you me). The Amador is gone now; where it stood is now the parking lot of the Jackson branch of El Dorado Savings…

…and the Ione Theatre is also gone, gutted by fire decades ago. The space is now a mini-mall housing a hair salon, a massage-and-tanning parlor, and other local businesses.

This locomotive is “Iron Ivan”. In 1955 it was the last steam engine operating on the Amador Central Railroad, a short (approx. 12 miles) line that operated entirely within the borders of Amador County. Ivan made this cameo appearance in a brief scene showing the area’s farmers arriving with their milk and eggs to ship them off to market. Iron Ivan was retired in 1956, not long after this scene was filmed…

…and rests now on permanent display in the Ione City Park.

This on the right is the little country church where the Ballots and their neighbors worship. It is from these windows, during a Sunday morning sermon on the evils of drink, that the congregation first notices the approach of cyclone weather. And it’s here that Matt literally seizes the reins and stems a rising panic in the parking lot as worshipers dash madly out to their wagons and autos to try to save what they can of their homes.

In 1955 this church was in the tiny community of Camanche, about five miles south of Ione. Today, Camanche is at the bottom of Camanche Reservoir, created when an earthfill dam was completed across the Mokelumne River in 1963. (For you non-Californians out there, the river’s name is pronounced “McCullumy”.)

The church, however, was moved to higher ground, where it stands today overlooking the north shore of the reservoir — with the addition of a newer entry vestibule and storage shed.

As I mentioned before, the mainspring of Come Next Spring is Monty Pittman’s pitch-perfect script. It tells an unusual yet simple and straightforward story without a wasted word or a false note. Even its minor characters — for example, Harry Shannon as neighbor Tom Totter (that’s him a few pictures up giving Matt Ballot the cold shoulder at the railroad siding), Wade Ruby as the preacher Delbert Meaner, and Roscoe Ates as Shorty Wilkins, the local moonshiner — are sketched in sharp detail with a few deft strokes. Sometimes only a few lines are all it takes to tell us what we need to know about these people — and Pittman knew the right few lines. Then there are the sensitive performances, and the typically emotional musical score by the great Max Steiner (including a title song written with Lenny Adelson that was a popular hit for Tony Bennett, who sings it under the credits).

Come Next Spring has been going in and out of print for over 30 years, ever since the dawn of the home video age. As near as I’ve been able to determine, it’s currently out. But the good news is that it’s not unavailable. It can be had for streaming here at Amazon Instant Video — it’s even free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime. (UPDATE 7/29/22: Sorry, it’s no longer free to Prime subscribers, alas. But it’s well worth the $3.99 to rent or the $12.99 to buy.)

So here’s a challenge for my Cinedrome readers. As soon as you finish reading this post — or as soon as you have 93 spare minutes — click over to Amazon Instant Video (here’s the link again, just to double-dog-dare you) and treat yourself to Come Next Spring. Do yourself a favor.

And one last thing. This is a promise: The very last shot of the picture, just before it fades to “The End”, is something you will remember as long as you live. Mark my words.

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 4

Posted on April 26, 2014 by Jim LaneAugust 30, 2016

According to the IMDb, Now and Forever‘s U.S. release date was August 31, 1934. However, it wasn’t reviewed by the New York Times or Variety until October 13 and 16, respectively. Apparently, either Fox sent the picture off to down-market engagements two-and-a-half months before opening it in New York — or (more likely, I think) the IMDb has the date wrong.

Whatever the case, both Andre Sennwald in the Times and Abel Green (again) in Variety pegged Shirley as Now and Forever‘s saving grace. Sennwald:

The little girl has lost none of her obvious delight in her work during her rise to fame. In “Now and Forever” she is, if possible, even more devastating in her unspoiled freshness of manner than she has been in the past…With Shirley’s assistance [the photoplay] becomes, despite its violent assaults upon the spectator’s credulity, a pleasant enough entertainment.

And Green:

“Now and Forever” is a remote title; it strains credulity; it can’t stand analysis; it has sundry other technical and plausibility shortcomings — but it has Shirley Temple and that virtually underwrites it for boxoffice…Shirley Temple in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” would probably click just as well.

In these reviews, both written by seasoned showbiz observers, the subtext is unmistakeable: Shirley Temple saves the show; Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard do their best, but without Shirley they’d have gone down with the ship. And Shirley is still only six years old.

Next it was back home to Fox for…

Bright Eyes

(released December 20, 1934)

Shirley’s last picture of 1934 teamed her for the third time with James Dunn — not as her father this time, but as her godfather, an airplane pilot named “Loop” Merritt. William Conselman’s script (from a story by Edwin Burke and director David Butler) gave the two stars an unusual setting: the early years of commercial aviation, when airmail was an innovation and passenger flights were strictly for the well-to-do, who could fly coast-to-coast only in short hops of 200 miles or so, while the vast majority of the moviegoing audience could only dream of someday, maybe, going up in a plane. Much of the picture was shot on the grounds of Grand Central Air Terminal in Glendale, ten miles north of downtown Los Angeles, and it served as a publicity gold mine for American Airlines and Douglas Aircraft, both of which cooperated generously with the production.

Shirley plays Shirley Blake, whose father, Loop’s best friend since childhood, died in a plane crash some years before the story opens. Shirley spends much of her time with Loop and his aviator pals, and is something of a mascot around the airport, while her widowed mother works as a maid to a family in nearby Flintridge (then, as now under its incorporated name of La Canada Flintridge, an affluent suburb of L.A.).

The airport is a lot more fun than home; Shirley loves her mother and the other servants, but the family they all work for is a trio of world-class pills. Mr. and Mrs. “Smythe” (real name Smith, but that’s not good enough for them) are a couple of selfish, snooty social-climbing snobs. As the story opens on Christmas Eve, Mrs. Smythe (Dorothy Christy) is reprimanding Shirley’s mother Mary (Lois Wilson) for taking so many personal phone calls and visits from her aviator friends. As Mary slinks contritely back to the kitchen, the effete Mr. Smythe (Theodor von Eltz) smirks, “I told you when you engaged her that it wouldn’t work out.” “Well,” she sighs, “she was so pathetic about wanting a nice home for her little girl that I let my sympathy get the better of my judgment.” Then, showing the true depth of her sympathy, she adds, “I’ll let her go right after the holidays.”

BE-frame01a-WithersW As bad as the Smythes are, they’re not the worst of it. That would be their daughter Joy (Jane Withers), a screaming little monster in a perpetual state of tantrum, and the most misnamed child in the history of human life on Earth.

In real life, eight-year-old Jane was nothing like the character she played. Bright Eyes was her big break after a handful of uncredited bits since 1932. Fox quickly signed her to a seven-year contract and she went on to become a star in her own right, though inevitably in Shirley’s shadow, especially since they worked for the same studio. The two girls never worked together again — which is a pity, because Jane was the perfect foil for her younger co-star, and in Bright Eyes she comes as close as anybody ever did to stealing a show from Shirley Temple. Playing an obnoxious, spoiled-rotten brat, Jane was genuinely funny — no small achievement when you consider how many child actors over the years have tried to be funny, only to come off looking like obnoxious, spoiled-rotten brats.

Jane continued acting into her early 20s, even after 20th Century Fox dropped her in 1942, then she retired from the screen in favor of marriage to a rich Texas oil man. That foundered after eight years, and Jane made a comeback as a character actress in George Stevens’s Giant in 1956. Thereafter, she stayed busy in movies and on TV, and she became familiar to millions of baby boomers as Josephine the Plumber in a series of commercials for Comet Cleanser in the 1960s and ’70s. As of this writing Jane Withers is still with us, and hopefully in good health and spirits. Continued long life to her.

But back to Bright Eyes. Rounding out the household is Uncle Ned Smith (Charles Sellon), a crotchety old invalid who drives his wheelchair around the house like an assault vehicle, barking and grumbling sourly at everybody. Underneath the crust, however, he’s an old softie, especially toward Shirley; it’s just that he has no patience with his nephew and niece-in-law’s hifalutin airs (the original family name is good enough for him), and he can’t stand the holy terror Joy. He knows the Smythes don’t like him any more than he likes them, that they only fawn over him in hopes of a big payoff when he finally kicks the bucket, and he enjoys lording it over them for just that reason.

Finally there’s Mrs. Smythe’s cousin Judith Allen (Adele Martin), visiting from back east for the holidays. By a remarkable coincidence, Judith is the former society debutante whose family pressured her into jilting Loop Merritt years earlier. It’s clear she still thinks the world of Loop, but just as clear that he feels once-bitten-twice-shy; the best she can get from him when they meet is an icy politeness.

So that’s the situation going into Christmas Day, when Mary Blake, hurrying through her duties and rushing off to join a Christmas party at the air field with Shirley, Loop and the boys, is struck and killed by an automobile. Uncle Ned orders the Smythes to take the orphaned Shirley in, but they’re not happy about it. Neither is Loop, and as Shirley’s godfather he wants to bring her to live with him, even though the life of a seat-of-the-pants aviator is marginal at best. Uncle Ned thinks he knows what’s best, and takes steps to adopt Shirley. This prompts Loop to take on a dangerous flight in deadly foul weather to earn the money to hire a lawyer to fight Uncle Ned’s expensive legal team. Meanwhile, Shirley, knowing full well how unwelcome she is in the Smythe house, stows away on Loop’s plane. The stage is set for a nasty custody battle — that is, if Shirley and Loop can manage to survive the flight.

Bright Eyes was the first movie created from the ground up specifically to showcase Shirley Temple, and it has many of the elements that would become standard in Shirley’s pictures: Shirley the orphan, the legions of grown-ups charmed by her, the cranky old coot for her to win over (although in this case she’s won him over before the movie begins), etc. And not incidentally, it has the Shirley Temple song, “On the Good Ship Lollipop” by Richard Whiting and Sidney Clare. I’m not posting a YouTube clip here because, frankly, I don’t think I need to — is there anybody over the age of 18 who doesn’t know this scene? It’s interesting to note, though, that the song isn’t about a seagoing vessel — it’s about an airplane. As Shirley sings in the verse:

I’ve thrown away my toys

Even my drum and trains

I want to make some noise

With real live aeroplanes

Someday I’m going to fly

I’ll be a pilot too

And when I do

How would you

Like to be my crew

On the goo-oo-ood ship Lollipop…

Bright Eyes was Shirley’s last teaming with James Dunn, who had pretty much been her steady escort to the top of the heap at Fox. Dunn himself, however, was on the way down, thanks in large part to his increasing dependency on alcohol. He didn’t make the cut when Fox merged with 20th Century in 1935, and he drifted off to other studios: first Warners, then Universal, then a long sojourn on Poverty Row, almost unemployable. He made a comeback of sorts — ironically, at 20th Century Fox — in 1945, winning an Oscar as the charming, alcoholic father in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (a virtually autobiographical role). He never really made it back to the top, or out of the bottle, but his Irish charm never entirely deserted him, and he worked steadily until his death at 65 after stomach surgery in 1967.

*** * ***

In a nutshell — and not counting five shorts and bit roles under her old contract to Jack Hays, or the two walk-ons in Change of Heart and Now I’ll Tell — Shirley Temple’s output for 1934 consisted of a breakthrough debut in Stand Up and Cheer!, a confirming star turn in Little Miss Marker, a placeholding appearance in Baby Take a Bow, credit for the save in Now and Forever, and a tailor-made vehicle in Bright Eyes. A great year for any rising star, and unprecedented for one who turned six midway through it.

In Child Star Shirley remembers that when Oscar nominations for 1934 were announced, “a vicious cat fight had erupted. My name was on the nomination list and odds-makers had me an almost certainty to win.” She goes on to assert that a storm of protest arose over the Academy’s failure to nominate either Myrna Loy for The Thin Man or Bette Davis for Of Human Bondage, and that as a result her own nomination was rescinded and voting rules changed to allow for write-ins. I’ve been unable to find this confirmed anywhere else, and I suspect Shirley’s memory was playing her false. She doesn’t say which picture she believed she had been nominated for (if they’d had supporting awards in ’34, she might have been a cinch to win for Little Miss Marker, but those categories were still two years in the future). Shirley is right, however, about the write-ins and the protest — though the storm was more on behalf of Davis than Loy (in the end, the award went to Claudette Colbert for It Happened One Night; Davis, even with the write-ins, came in third).

Be that as it may, there was no ignoring Shirley’s meteoric rise to the top tier of box-office stars, and the Academy Board of Governors conferred a new award, a miniature statuette “in grateful recognition of her outstanding contribution to screen entertainment during the year”. The emcee at that year’s awards was the prolific Kentucky humorist, author and columnist Irvin S. Cobb (shown here with Shirley), one of those writers whose fame more or less died when he did in 1944. Most of his 60-plus books and 300 short stories are out of print now, and he is probably best remembered for what he said that night. First: “There was one great towering figure in the cinema game, one artiste among artistes, one giant among the troupers, whose monumental, stupendous and elephantine work deserved special mention…Is Shirley Temple in the house?” Then, after Shirley joined him at the podium: “Listen, y’all ain’t old enough to know what this is all about. But honey, I want to tell you that when Santa Claus wrapped y’all up in a package and dropped you down Creation’s chimney, he brought the loveliest Christmas present that was ever given to the world.”

In Child Star, even 50-plus years on, Shirley’s disappointment still sounds tender to the touch (“If mine was really a commendable job done, why not a big Oscar like everyone else’s?”), but I think she overlooks the specialness of her special award (the only one given that year). The miniature Oscar that was created just for her would remain the standard recognition for outstanding juvenile performers for the next 26 years, and would be given 11 more times. The last went to Hayley Mills for Pollyanna in 1960; after that, beginning with nine-year-old Mary Badham for To Kill a Mockingbird in 1962, the kids would have to take their chances with the grownups (and some — Patty Duke, Tatum O’Neal, Anna Paquin — would even win). Of those dozen miniature-Oscar winners — who include Mickey Rooney, Deanna Durbin, Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien and others — the little girl who inspired the creation of it was the youngest to receive it. In fact, she remains to this day the youngest person ever to win anything from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. I doubt if that record will ever be broken.

Shirley Temple’s career hit its stride with Bright Eyes. Nineteen-thirty-four had been a banner year, and the banner would continue to wave in ’35. I’ll get to that next time.

To be continued…

The Duke of Hollywood

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Jim LaneFebruary 24, 2021

Scott Eyman has been crafting definitive Hollywood biographies for over 20 years now, and each one seems to come hotter on the heels of the one before. His Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer and Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille appeared only five years apart (2005 and 2010 respectively); a lesser writer — someone like, well, me for instance — might have spent 12 or 15 years on either one of them and never managed to convey the sense that yes, this must be what the man was like, as well as Scott did both times. And as if that weren’t impressive enough, in between those two he collaborated with Robert Wagner on his 2008 autobiography Pieces of My Heart.

(Full disclosure: Scott Eyman is a friend of mine. I first met him about 15 years ago and could hardly believe I was shaking the hand that wrote The Speed of Sound [1997] — the indispensible book on the talkie revolution. Scott is some years younger than I am, but I hope to be just like him when I grow up.)

Scott’s latest book is John Wayne: The Life and Legend — and yes, this must be what the man was like. This is very much a companion volume to Scott’s 1999 bio Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, and it could hardly be otherwise: the two names were linked in life and art as few others have been. Both books end with the final image from The Searchers: Wayne as Ethan Edwards, framed in the cabin door and walking away from the family reunion into a barren landscape.

There are no bombshell revelations in John Wayne, yet the book is full of surprises — beginning with the cover, which pictures a younger, slimmer, smoother Wayne than we’re used to. (I carried the book into a Hallmark card store one day and set it on the counter while I paid for my purchase. The clerk, looking at it upside down, thought it was a picture of James Dean.)

Other surprises: The idea that Wayne stumbled into acting by accident was a myth propagated by Wayne himself. In fact, he was movie-struck from childhood, stage-struck as early as high school, and began lobbying for on-screen parts from the day he first walk onto the Fox lot as a laborer. And his feelings for his parents — the feckless father whom he adored for his kindness, the stern mother (who detested him to her dying day) whom he resented even as he paid tribute to “her strength of character, her strong sense of right and wrong, and her temper — all of which he inherited.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me was how separately the man viewed himself from “John Wayne”. “In Wayne’s own mind,” Scott writes, “He was Duke Morrison. John Wayne was to him what the Tramp was to Charlie Chaplin — a character that overlapped his own personality, but not to the point of subsuming it.” The Duke never legally changed his name; his death certificate identified him as “Marion Morrison (John Wayne)”.

Two quotes from the Duke, which Scott uses as epigraphs, illustrate this separation. From 1957: “The guy you see on the screen isn’t really me. I’m Duke Morrison, and I never was and never will be a film personality like John Wayne. I know him well. I’m one of his closest students. I have to be. I make a living out of him.” And again, much later: “I’ve played the kind of man I’d like to have been.” These two wistful quotes put me in mind of the famous remark by Cary Grant (who always thought of himself as Archie Leach): “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”

Scott gives us a picture of Wayne the underrated actor (how anyone could watch Wayne’s performances in Stagecoach, They Were Expendable, The Searchers, True Grit, Island in the Sky, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man and still say he was “always the same” strikes me as a study in obtuseness, and I suspect Scott would feel the same way). The biography doesn’t shrink from an honest appraisal of the conservative politics that made Wayne such a hated lightning rod in the last third of his life, or the fact that he could be impatient, demanding, gregarious and charming — sometimes by turns, sometimes all at once. We also see the history buff who knew the American Civil War backward and forward, the collector who could discuss Asian or Native American art, and the “demon chess player” who could psych out an opponent as much as out-maneuver him on the board.

Last but never least, John Wayne: The Life and Legend shows us the man who loved everything about making movies, who was first on the set in the morning and the last to leave at night. And who loved to talk about movies, his own and other people’s. At one point, Scott quotes reporter Billy Wilkerson of the Hollywood Reporter, who sat in on a conversation between Wayne and director William Wellman in 1954, when the two were putting the finishing touches on The High and the Mighty: “They had praise for every name brought into the gab and, above all, praise for the business that made it possible for unknowns to become great personages in such a short span. They had logical excuses for some failures — theirs and others — with never a knock, never derision, always enthusiasm.”

That, I think, is the John Wayne I would like to have met. And thanks to Scott Eyman, I feel like I have.

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Category Archives: Blog Entries

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 11

Heidi

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 10

Wee Willie Winkie

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 9

Dimples

Stowaway

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 8

Poor Little Rich Girl

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 7

The Littlest Rebel

Captain January

Next time: Fox’s top two female stars go head-to-head.

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 6

Our Little Girl

Curly Top

To be continued…

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 5

The Little Colonel

To be continued…

CMBA Blogathon: Come Next Spring (1956)

*** * ***

*** * ***

Shirley Temple Revisited, Part 4

Bright Eyes

*** * ***

To be continued…

The Duke of Hollywood